Snips and Snails
by T.S. Blue
Summary: A surprise guest on the farmhouse porch grinds the Duke boys' gears and stalls them out – until another surprise comes along to make everything worse. Or is it better? Rated T to be safe. Complete.
1. The Next Fall

_**Author's Note:** This one's a little different, at least for me. Not my usual subject matter, but it's been in my head for a long time, waiting for me to figure out how to write it. Hopefully I have succeeded, and if I have, I owe it to HazzardHusker and Mirthless Laughter, both of whom encouraged me through it and shared some of their own experiences to help me flesh it out some more. Also, I used the balladeer for the first time ever on this story. Not sure if he'll hang around for other stories, but he's been pretty helpful for this one._

_Relevant canon for this chapter is "A Baby for the Dukes" from season six. Dialogue from the episode is included. (And, yeah, the chapter title might seem weird right now. It'll explain itself later, I promise.)  
_

_And that's it, other than the usual disclaimers and apologies to the real people who own these characters/played them on TV. Sorry all – I can't seem to stop messing with you!_

* * *

**The Next Fall**

_September 30, 1983_

_**Friends, welcome to a perfect Hazzard noontime, where the skies are blue, the breeze is filled with the smells of fall flowers and fried chicken, and the sound of guitar strings and singing echoes through the hollows. See that charming little clump of blues and yellows? Them ain't flowers, them's people. More to the point, them's Dukes: Bo, Luke, Daisy and Jesse. Ain't it hard to believe that such a nice-looking bunch of folk is about to jump into the fertilizer with all eight of their feet? **_

The guitar neck is a warm, familiar fit in his hands, even if his uncle has banned any more playing – dawdling, he calls it, though he'd been content to sing along with the rest of them when he knew the words – for now, condemning them all home for an afternoon of chores. The sun's doing a lazy southward tip that tells the tale of October knocking on the door of September, and the breeze feels cool against sunwarmed skin. There's the promise of the drive-in come dark, which is more of a lawn-chair-in since it'll be in the middle of Hazzard Square. A white sheet stretched from one tree to the next, an old projector on the stump with a long extension cord running across the road and into the courthouse, and a movie that's at least five years old and wasn't popular even then, but it's an annual tradition in Hazzard. Everyone goes, even Boss Hogg, who collects two dollars from each person in the vicinity. Even if it's not his event.

"Someone's got to pay for the electricity," he always simpers and there's no one that can dispute that fact so they mostly cough up the money without too much complaining. Then they buy his popcorn, too, even though it's far too expensive, isn't real corn and the yellowish stuff on top sure isn't butter. The whole snack is mostly constructed out of salt crystals, which ensures a thirsty crowd that will buy watery cokes to wash it down.

It's all worth it though, for the girls. And the courting, and the darkness, and the blankets spread out on the grass. Yep, it's going to be a fine night, once the guitars are stowed, the chores done and dinner—

And then anything that might have been simple, easy and fun about the day – heck about the whole year – gets lost in reality when Luke walks ahead of the rest of them, right up to the General Lee as though he trusts that their car would never betray them.

"Hey, y'all," he says, interrupting an intense discussion of popcorn (that's really just a conversation about the night's activities, cleverly disguised so Uncle Jesse won't get to lecturing them about the shenanigans they really plan to get up to once the sun's light fades completely from the square). "Hey, we got company here." Luke's guitar gets leaned against the side of the General, like so much forgotten kindling, and his cousin's reaching into the shotgun seat, hands wide and gentle, half a soft smile on his face. "He's got some kind of note pinned to him."

_No_, Bo wants to say. _Stop_. _Let's just go back up the slope, unpack our picnic basket, settle our guitars across our knees, sing about cowboys and Duke boys and forget anything at all about company, especially this kind. _

But he doesn't, he moves forward out of instinct, arms outstretched to take what Luke offers him with practiced hands.

Daisy's there, hot and close, leaving Bo caught somewhere between being angry at her for snatching away what Luke was trying to hand him, and relieved that his arms are still free. Relief wins out when there's a small cry from his right, where Daisy stands, and steady reading from his left, where Luke has uncrumpled the note that was held in a tiny fist.

"'Dear Duke family, please take care of my baby. Some bad people are trying to steal him from me. And please don't give him up to the authorities. I'll come back to your house for him as soon as I can. Thank you with all my heart, Jamey's mother.'"

This one's got a mother, and more than that, a mother that's coming back for him. Soon, it sounds like, maybe today and that would be for the best. If none of them had to feed this baby, to change him or bathe him or—

And at least he has a name. That alone saves more trouble than anyone would guess.

"Who the heck is Jamey's mother?" And where is she, and what does she think she's doing – no, it's not her fault. If she figures there are bad folks out to kidnap her baby, it's a cinch that she'd leave him with the Dukes. Odds are, she doesn't know any better. It's been more than a year and it was summer, a season for planting and tending and watering and otherwise worrying about crops. There's plenty of folk in town who never even knew.

_**Now if you're wondering what old Bo's thinking about there, well, some things ain't easy for a man to put words to, even in his own mind. So if he can't or won't get around to telling you the story, don't you worry none. It'll get told all the same.**_

"I hate to say this but," Jesse butts in, looking from Bo and Luke to the bundle wrapped in blue and back again. "I guess we'd better take him by and give him to Rosco or somebody."

Daisy has an argument to make against that notion. Jostling, cuddling, kissing and fussing, she makes it right into the baby's face. "Uncle Jesse!" She looks to her each of cousins for support, though it's doubtful she finds much there. "That's just what she said not to do!" The baby gets bounced in her arms, like that's going to soothe a kid who's been dumped off in a stranger's car, passed from one set of arms to another and subjected to the raised voices of strangers. The instinct rises up to take the baby from her until she can calm herself and talk quietly, but that would mean holding him. Smelling the baby powder his mother must have put on him an hour – maybe two – ago, feeling his trusting weight, looking into his eyes. Blue eyes, most likely, the color of Luke's. But Bo doesn't know for sure because he's been keeping himself at arm's length from the baby. "She begged us not to take him to the authorities!"

Luke, he notices, is also doing a fine job of keeping himself at a distance from the little one. Making faces like he's annoyed by Daisy's words, and just maybe he is. Maybe he's more annoyed that she's right.

"Well, uh," their uncle stumbles, looking to him, to Luke, for help. "There you go, little feller," seals the deal, though. Jesse's done what no one other than Daisy's really been willing to do up until now. He's let the baby have a small square of his heart. His big old hand pats gruffly on the tiny shoulder. "I suppose we could take him by the house and change him and clean him up a little bit and maybe feed him." It's a question, and it's posed at his two nephews_. Do you want to? Is this a good idea or will it send you running for the hills again?_

_**Now friends, I know you're asking yourself why Jesse Duke would be wondering if it's a good idea to help out a neighbor by feeding and changing her helpless baby, and you'll get the answers, I promise. But first we've got to get this poor little critter safely back to the Duke farm and make him comfortable. It just ain't safe for a baby to be standing with the Dukes on the side of the road. Not with how passing cars have a bad habit of aiming themselves in all manner of strange directions when the Duke boys are around.**_

Well, honestly, what are they supposed to say? No? We've been down this road before and it's a dead end with nothing but concrete to stop the momentum? Luke agrees it's a good idea and Bo makes sure he's got the car keys so they can take the baby home with them. They all crawl in their various windows and get underway.

The true test of their commitment to bringing the little one back to their house comes in the form of lights and sirens and clouds of dust kicking up behind them.

"What a time for Rosco to show up," Luke grumbles, which isn't really fair to their sheriff. After all, the man lives in this town, too; simple happenstance will cause them to cross paths with him every now and then. And there hasn't been a single time in the past decade that it's been a good time for Rosco to show up.

Daisy begs him from the back seat to keep the sheriff from getting any closer to her and the baby she's cradling like it's her own and she means to keep it. _Quit that_, he wants to tell her_. That kind of thing can only end in misery._ Especially with Jamey's mother out here somewhere, planning on reclaiming the kid any second now.

"Well, I got to drive careful so the baby don't get too shook up," he says like an echo of words that he's heard a few times before. Maybe even going back a bunch of years when he and Luke were shuttling Mary Kaye Porter around and she was just about big enough to burst. Slowing down and being protective used to go against every instinct he had; now it just seems natural.

Luke, who has taken to the back with Daisy (and Bo figures that's almost as bad an idea as the way his girl cousin's letting herself get attached to little Jamey), offers to hang on to the baby, leaving Bo free to drive any way he wants. He ought to be grateful for the opportunity.

He's not, not when it comes at the price of the careful balance of peace that he and Luke have finally managed to find over the past few months.

Losing Rosco at Joe Kemper's roadside vegetable stand is as easy as breathing. It's like a magic trick – a bright-colored distraction on the side of the road is bound to draw the sheriff's full attention and attract him like a magnet. It makes Daisy happy to see an end to the chase, but Bo can't help but notice that Luke keeps on hand on the baby's carrier, even after the danger is gone.

_This is not a good idea_, he wants to holler_. Let's turn right back around and peel the bananas and tomatoes off of Rosco's cruiser, find the sheriff buried underneath, and hand him that little fella, carrier and all. He's good with babies, speaks their language fluently. He can get Jamey to 'fess up to who his mother is and we can just go home and forget that any of this ever happened._ A little popcorn, a little movie, a little necking with whichever pretty girl makes herself most available and the day can just get right back onto the tracks it started out on. Perfectly safe tracks, which lead to well-known destinations. None of these crazy side-tracks leading to Dukes raising babies…

But he doesn't turn around, doesn't surrender the child to the authorities (maybe because he doesn't want to surrender his eyes to Daisy's fingernails), he just gets them home, safe sound and with one extra mouth to feed.

"I sure don't see how we're going to take care of a baby here at the farm," he announces to a kitchen filled with his kin, all of them making goo-goo eyes at the kid like they haven't learned a thing. Heck, even Mary Kaye could have told them – the Duke farm is a nice place for a baby to visit for an hour or two, but it's no place that one should live. (Himself aside – there are pictures of Bo, grinning widely despite his lack of teeth and hair, sitting in the old high chair that was his father's before him, in this same kitchen, at this same table.)

"Well, don't you worry about it!" Daisy snaps at him, claiming what she figures is her rightful place at the center of this particular crisis. "I'll take care of him." Sitting at the table, arms full of baby that she jiggles and jostles like she doesn't know any better. It would seem that she should have learned something, somewhere along the line. He looks to Luke, who looks away and shrugs. Let her do what she wants, the gesture says.

"It's going to be kind of fun having a little tyke around the house again," Jesse concurs from the stove where he's heating a bottle in that old iron pan with an energy that's been missing from his movements for the past year or so. _Stop_, Bo wants to say again, as the conversation tumbles over that familiar stony ground of how little he and Luke were when they first came here, who cried and who was sullen and quiet. _This can't end happily._ Even little Jamey cries about what he somehow knows is coming.

"Luke," Bo says, because he can't just stand here, keeping a safe distance from the kid while Daisy holds onto him like she used to hold her dolls. Like she means to keep him in a tiny crib in her room. "I sure feel sorry for him." It sounds about right, sounds like what he ought to say. Much better than _I feel sorry for us_. "Why don't we go out and try to find his mama?"

Luke starts to formulate a plan like they all know he will. Like he did last time this very thing happened, and Bo can only hope it turns out a little better this time than it did before.


	2. Day One: Chickens, Goats and Kids

**Day One: Chickens, Goats and Kids  
**

_**Now, folks, if you look closely here you can see a few things have changed since we were last peeked in on the Dukes. First of all, the sun's just starting to climb over trees that are covered in the bright green leaves of spring instead of the near-yellows of September. And then there are those two boys, sound asleep in their beds, looking innocent as angels. Look at how Bo's hair curls around his face, and doesn't it look like he's got more of it than he did when we were last visiting with him? Luke's face is thinner and I'd swear we've just gone back to a spring morning a year and a half ago…**_

_May 3, 1982_

Goats weren't ever his friends. They weren't stubborn like mules, but then they weren't half as smart, either. They'd chew up anything that came within reaching distance of their mouths, even if it was attached to a human or a car. Why, once Bonnie Mae had gone after the hoe, though Jesse swore she'd only been licking the salty sweat from Bo's overworked hands off the wood. All the same, by the time Bo wrestled it back from her there were plenty of teeth marks up and down the handle, and the balance of the tool had never been the same again afterward.

Goats weren't easy to live with and they could get into all manner of trouble without even hardly trying, but they didn't – at least the last time Bo looked – have opposable thumbs or even paws. They had hoofs and horns and yet he would swear that the sound echoing around the far corner of the farmhouse had to be a goat strangling a chicken. Or maybe the other way around, though he couldn't quite figure out how that would work, either. Or why? Not for food, so it had to be some sort of a farmyard squabble, the chicken mocking the goat or the goat insulting the chicken…

And then, quite suddenly, Bo wasn't dreaming anymore, wasn't sleeping at all, was halfway to his feet before he'd even figured out exactly where he was.

"Luke," he hissed out into the thin light of their pre-dawn bedroom. "'Coon in the henhouse," he added, louder, as he pushed through the door, across the living room, into the kitchen. At least that's what he figured it had to be, even if the sound still struck him as a goat being smothered or otherwise mishandled.

More bare feet slapping hard into the floorboards behind him as he flung the kitchen door wide and shoved past the screen door to find himself on the porch, stopping short like a car with a locked brake.

"Bo," came the cranky cry from Luke when he nearly smacked into his suddenly motionless back, and then there was the grunt of their old uncle as he pulled himself to a halt behind them, too. Or Bo assumed he did. He wouldn't know for sure, what with how his eyes couldn't move from that – thing – lying in the middle of the splintering floorboards of the porch.

"Ooh," was the first sign that Daisy had joined them too, looking around all the obstructing kin in front of her at what was neither a choking chicken nor a smothered goat but was worse than both, by far. "Well, lookie there."

"Luke," he said in that tone that always crept into his voice when guns got pointed in his face. The one that cracked and split and all but begged his older cousin to get between him and the dangerous thing.

"I see it, Bo," Luke answered back, his voice low and quiet. Warning him – warning all of them, really – not to make any false moves or sideways steps. The tone meant to keep everyone around them calm when there was a rattler in their path.

But it wasn't a gun or a snake, and Luke's Marine training wasn't going to help them any or keep Daisy safe from this one. She shoved her way around her frozen kinfolk and walked right up to that – thing – like it wasn't dangerous.

"Well, hi there, little one." Her knees gave a dainty pop as she squatted down in her ridiculously short baby doll nightgown, her shoulders and knees exposed knobs, her hands reaching out to touch it.

Bo took an involuntary step back, his bare heel landing squarely on Luke's toes. For once his cousin didn't complain or holler, just grabbed him firmly by the ribcage and moved him over to the side. Good idea; keep quiet and definitely don't show fear.

"What are you doing here?" Daisy's hand, oh, but it was too late. Slipping its way into the fold of a blanket of crocheted blue and green yarn, lifting the bundle it was wrapped around, pulling it close to her chest and listening as the choking chicken noises morphed into angry little screams.

"It's a baby," Jesse announced, voice high with wonder.

_**Well, what do you know about that? Usually you find them left on the church steps, don't you? At least that's what I've heard. Anyway, this one's as abandoned as abandoned can be. No mama anywhere to be spotted. Wonder how long the little critter's been waiting to be found?**_

"Of course it's a baby, Uncle Jesse," Daisy answered as the little thing hollered its dismay at being found or being touched, being lifted from its brightly-colored plastic car seat, and Bo could agree whole-heartedly with the sentiment. The baby didn't want to be here and Bo didn't want it here.

"What's it doing here?" he asked, trying to step back again when Daisy swiveled on her heels to face her kin, with the baby snug in her arms. Behind him was the solidness of Luke and in front of him was the screaming redness of a tiny face, half pressed against Daisy's shoulder.

Daisy's lopsided shrug got blocked from his view when the width of his uncle, wearing that striped nightshirt that draped widely over his belly and hung to his knees, stepped in front of him. Hunkered down to look at the critter in Daisy's arms, and made one of those soft faces that fools always did when there was a baby – human or bovine or goat or fowl – then looked back over his shoulder. Face gone stony, not red with anger, no yelling or blustering or threatening a hide-tanning, nothing to soften the words that followed.

"That's what I want to know, young man." Same tone he used to use when the Duke cousins were little and a collection of toys cars would get left in the middle of the living room floor for an unsuspecting adult to stumble over. Innocent faces would line the edges of the room while Jesse demanded to know who had made the mess.

"I don't know," Bo answered. Faded blue eyes squinted at him, daring him to stick to his story. "I don't!" But it was the truth. He knew nothing at all about the squalling, red, slobber machine getting bounced in Daisy's arms. (Bo figured all that bobbing around wasn't going to calm the kid down any. But he had no intention of getting involved.) "I swear!"

The oldster stood up to his full height, leaving Daisy alone to tend to the fussy bundle in her arms. This was the part where it was important not to flinch or shuffle or otherwise betray nervousness (but who could keep his cool with Uncle Jesse staring at him quite that hard?) while those rheumy eyes scanned from the tips of his hair to the nails on his toes, looking for the lie hidden in his involuntary movements.

"What about you?" their uncle asked, looking over Bo's shoulder at where Luke stood.

"No, sir," his cousin answered and that should have told all the tales that needed telling. Luke almost never called anyone sir, not unless they wore black robes and had the authority to sentence him to ten years in prison. "I don't know nothing about it." Also suspect – they'd both been through the requisite twelve years of schooling and they both knew about double negatives, even if they used them all the time. Still, Luke was tricky enough to use one now to tell the truth and lie all at once. "But I reckon if me and Bo jumped into the General right now," barefoot and bare chested, with only thinning flannel pajama pants covering them from hips to mid-calf, "and drove on out Old Mill Road, we could find whoever dropped it here."

His cousin was a genius.

* * *

They searched every road they could think of, even the ones that no one had driven since the last Duke moonshine delivery was made six years back. Wearing next to nothing, early morning chill settling moistly against their skin, and they couldn't even scare up Rosco or Cletus because there was no one, not even a wandering deer, to be found anywhere.

"What about the Black Paw Ridge Road?" Bo asked with a nervous sort of glee, grateful for a new idea that would take them some distance from home but still keep them within the county. Never mind that Black Paw Ridge was one of those roads that dead ended at a clearing in the woods, a launching point for many a late fall hunting trip. Any vehicle that'd gone up there would have to come back down of its own accord, what with there being no other way out. Luke's hand waved in the air noncommittally – there were no fresh tire tracks in the loose dust of the road and there'd be nothing to be found up there, but the longer they drove around pointlessly, the longer they could avoid what was sure to be a mess back home.

"Luke, there ain't nothing up here," came too early, and asked too much of him. _Give me a new plan of action_, Bo's complaining tone begged. _Someplace else to look or to hide because the farm's bound to be more dangerous than a Boss Hogg scheme on mortgage day._

But all roads led home. There wasn't ever much of a trail to follow, but if there had been, it was long cold by now. Luke shrugged, turned to meet Bo's eyes that he knew would be looking to him for answers, and pointed out the windshield. _Drive._

Bo huffed a miserable little sigh and scratched at the rat's nest of blond on his head, but they had to go home sometime. After all, their pants were there, and whatever the rest of the day held for them, they were going to want to be wearing pants. Maybe three or four layers, if the whip got pulled out.

_**Boy, it ain't never good when them boys don't want to face Jesse. Still, I reckon the old timer is the only one who can get to the bottom of this mess for us. One of them boys is likely to give in and confess to save the other one's hide. They're good like that.**_

By the time the General's engine stilled with a complaining shudder in the farmyard, the sun had climbed high enough into the sky for the young leaves to leave a dappled patch of shade on the dirt. The chickens were squabbling and complaining in their coop as Luke pulled himself out of the passenger window, which went to prove that the morning hadn't started properly. Found himself torn between getting to the barn to do the chores and going inside to face Jesse – either way he and Bo were likely to get hollered at for things they had or hadn't done. Hard to know which way it would go, so he looked at Bo, tried to tuck in a shirt he wasn't even wearing, and nodded toward the door. Bo nodded back at him. _We're in this together._

Hard to know, when they'd stepped into the warmth of the kitchen to be greeted by the kind of squalling that only mother nature would dare compete with, and then only in March, whether the crying had gone on nonstop since they'd jumped into the General and run off in search of the child's mother, or whether it had quit and started up all over again. Not that it mattered; he and Bo stood, barefoot and bare chested, just inside the kitchen door. As far from the racket as they could get and still it was too close.

"Uh," Bo said, then let the sound drown in the rest of the noise of the kitchen. Daisy's hair was about as big as a small shrub, her face pasty, but her eyes were mean and dark. They promised all manner of injury to anyone at all that further upset the infant in her arms, who was clearly already well past upset.

"No luck," Luke finished off for him. Figured that if Daisy meant to kill him, well, she'd have to put the baby down first and that would give him time to get a head start. If he could make it to the General he'd be all right. Sure, Daisy would chase after him and she'd even get as far as jumping into her Jeep and riding his bumper out of the farmyard and down the lane to Old Mill Road, but by then she'd realize that the robe she'd put on wasn't doing much by way of protecting her from the wind or from potentially prying eyes, and she'd turn back. The thing was, he couldn't leave the county anyway, so eventually she'd get herself dressed in real clothes and then she'd come out and find him, and what she doled out then would be mean. "We couldn't find no trace of nothing."

"Couldn't find no trace," and in that moment, Luke realized (and felt Bo stiffen next to him with that same realization) that he'd let his attention be lulled from the real danger. One look at his uncle's pink coloring and lowered eyebrows reminded him that there was no escape from the wrath of Jesse Duke. "Couldn't find no trace," a second time, wheedling up in that same range as the baby's cries. "There's your trace right there," the man added, finger jutting out at the pink mess of tears in Daisy's arms. "I want to know which one of you done it, and to which young lady."

"Wasn't there no note?" Bo squeaked out. Luke managed (just barely and with a feat of strength greater than he'd ever managed before, even back in his boxing days) not to roll his eyes, but only because he'd hoped for the same thing. A note found after they'd left, tangled up in the blanket or stuffed into that plastic car seat. Something explaining the baby's origin and absolving Luke of all responsibility.

Which would make Bo the guilty party, but that was the most likely scenario anyway. If he wasn't so worried about his hind end, Bo would agree with him on that. Heck, he'd even be proud. Mostly.

"A note!" Jesse snapped and the bundle in Daisy's arms screamed out louder about that. Smart little critter, it knew danger when it heard it. "A note!" Jesse repeated a little more quietly, and a fat finger came up to point. _Meet me in the barn_, it said, as clearly as it used to when they were kids with the juice of a stolen watermelon dripping off their chins.

"Uncle Jesse," Daisy exclaimed when she realized that she was about to be left alone with the noisemaker that couldn't be quieted.

"Just," their uncle counseled as the Duke boys headed out into the spring morning, still wearing far too little, "keep offering him the bottle and otherwise just sit with him, real steady. Talk to him all quiet-like and maybe sing."

So, it was a boy then. With any luck he'd like his tunes sung slightly off-key; Daisy was only accurate when accompanied by a guitar.

"Hold it right there," Jesse hollered after them as the two boys got the the bottom of the porch steps and started picking their barefoot way toward the barn. "Don't even think you're going running off on me." So apparently the finger had just told them to leave the house, not to go all the way into the barn. Luke stopped on the dirt and gravel about ten feet from the porch, turned and took a quick look at Bo to see him letting out a big sigh of relief as he did the same. It'd been ten years or more since they'd last taken a whipping, and there was no way they could face Cooter or Cletus or any of their friends again if they got one now.

"Yes, sir," Luke answered for them both. Bo snorted at his side, a giddy nervousness shivering through his body. Luke stuck out his elbow, lightly touching Bo's side with it. _Settle down_, the gesture advised, _and whatever you do, don't show fear._

Steely eyes flicked back and forth between them, seeking guilt or shame or anything that resembled an admission. "Now, I want to know which one of you," pause there to consider how he was going to say this next part, to feel the burn of the words in his throat and lick the taste of a dozen bars of soap off his lips. Words a good Duke never had to say because such things never happened if the kids were raised right. "Got some girl in the family way, then left her high and dry."

Naughty thoughts crossed through his head about how the girls in his life were usually pretty low and never particularly dry, but he swallowed those down. Looked at Bo who looked back at him in that same scared-innocent way he had since he was a toddler throwing dirt clods at the chickens.

Funny how there were no words being spoken, not by either one of them because they were Dukes and they couldn't lie. Couldn't even mislead when it was Uncle Jesse they were facing down and there weren't any loopholes to save them. There was nothing they could say when they didn't know what the truth was.

"I ain't been with no girl in the last three months," Bo finally blurted, smiling his great glee and holding up three fingers like they'd save his neck from getting wrung. Oh, the guy could manage some fine improvisation and shuck'n jive when facing down a revenuer or lawman, but put Jesse's flat-line-angry eyebrows in front of him and logic fell away in deference to blondness.

"Well, that's good, Bo, real good," Jesse answered him back, in that same tone he'd use on Rosco when the poor sheriff suddenly found himself wet and cold and missing a pair of suspects that had been there just moments ago. Like he'd talk to a man that'd been drinking too much 'shine all his life. "That means that little feller in there ain't going to have a brother any time real soon, but that don't explain nothing at all about where that baby come from!"

This wasn't, Luke figured, a good time offer his uncle a lesson on birds and bees and where babies came from. Not when his pants were inside and his backside was outside and mighty close to the barn.

"Now I reckon that baby's about two to three months old, and he didn't hatch out of no egg. The way I figure it, one of you boys has got some explaining to do about exactly what you was doing somewheres around the beginning of last June."

"Well, that's a long time ago, Uncle Jesse!" Bo complained, and he might as well have been twelve all over again, explaining the unfairness of a teacher who expected him to remember something he'd been taught a whole week before. "I don't know who I might have been with then!"

One cocked eyebrow and a slight tilt to that grizzled head were all it took for their uncle to convey all manner of disapproval at that statement. But Bo had a reasonably good point. Eleven months was a lot of girls ago. Luke had still been reeling from the betrayal of Phil Ackley's "sister" at the time and he might have tried to get right back on the horse he'd fallen off of. A few times.

"Well," he said, trying to be diplomatic, to save Bo from Jesse and Jesse from his own temper, "who's been pregnant recently?" That had to be a much smarter (not to mention safer) approach than him and Bo listing all the girls they could remember dating from here back to last summer.

"Becky Mae," Bo announced. "But she's been married for two years now."

Jesse offered up a gruff nod at that one. Neither of his boys would ever get involved with a married woman, no matter how pretty. Not if they valued their hind ends.

"Lori Beth," Luke countered, mentally scanning the pews at church and trying to remember whose dress might have had some extra fabric around the waist. "But she had a girl."

"About three months ago, now," Jesse agreed. He ought to know, he'd done the midwifing.

Luke snapped his fingers and pointed at Bo, who had taken to leaning against the side of the pickup truck, as if this were a perfectly casual conversation and not a matter of life and death. "Frannie Hawkins!"

"I didn't never date Frannie," Bo groused back, hotly.

"Me neither," Luke answered with a shrug. But she was notably round in the belly at the Valentine's Day cotillion. And just as notably unaccompanied.

"Well, what was you pointing at me for if I didn't date her?" So much for leaning, Bo was standing up to his full height again. And puffing out his chest with the goose bumps prickling up on his skin everywhere.

"I wasn't pointing at you." Even if he was. "Exactly, it was more like—"

"—You was trying to blame me when it's probably your baby. Heck I've always figured that at least two of them kids in that orphanage belonged to you," look who was pointing at who now, "and you was just too—"

"Boys—boys!" Jesse interjected. A mean stare going from one to the other of them and any thought of arguing or distracting the old man from his mission to figure out which one of them to punish died right there. "The way I see it, one of you boys is the daddy, and whichever one of you that is needs to own up to it and then do right by the poor girl that dropped that baby here." Slight pause, in case either one of them was suicidal and wanted to make a confession right then and there. "All right," the old man said, though the color of his cheeks made clear that absolutely nothing at all was all right. "Until the two of you decide to get real honest with me, you're both going to be taking care of that baby."

"But Uncle Jesse," Bo protested. Because ignoring the rattle of a riled snake was always the best way to go. "Daisy's a girl, and she likes looking after babies. And me and Luke are boys—"

"And one of you is a daddy, so you'd better start learning how to take care of a baby right quick. We all know that that baby in there ain't Daisy's." No, of all the girls with curves where they didn't belong in the past year, none of them had been Daisy. "Now you two's gonna take care of everything from feeding to changing to comforting that baby. And you're going to start by going up into that loft yonder," Jesse pointed upward at the top half of the barn. "And hauling that old crib down then putting it into your bedroom. You can handle midnight feedings, too."

Oh, that was bound to be a whole lot of fun.


	3. Week One: Spoiled Brats

_**Author's Note: **__I should probably__ point out that I tend to see the Dukes (especially the boys) as they were first revealed in season one. A bit rougher, a bit more promiscuous. Luke with the possibility of having a couple of kids in the orphanage and bitter ex-girlfriends (that he's a clod to) and Bo rolling around on a blanket with Jill (with more implied). In other words, though I placed this following season four, the characterizations are much more season one, making it entirely possible for there to be this baby left on the porch that could belong to either of them. I realize that not everyone likes to see the Dukes that way. If that's the case for you, then this story may not be your cup of tea, and that's okay. We all like what we like about canon characters, and no one can (or should) change that for us. _

_I will add that they might be scoundrels, but they are still good, respectable scoundrels that will (ultimately) do the right thing (even if sometimes they'd rather not)._

* * *

**Week One: Spoiled Brats  
**

_May 4-8, 1982_

_**Well, now, from what's going on here you'd figure that all them Duke boys ever do is sleep. Bo's just a puff of hair peeking out from under that blanket he's got pulled up to his forehead and Luke's got a funny curl to his body, like he fell asleep sitting up, then just toppled over. Them boys are actually kind of cute when they're sleeping, and it's about the only time Jesse gets any peace and quiet. Then again, look there along the wall closest to Luke's bed. See that cradle, and the unhappy little face in it? I don't reckon anyone's going to get any peace and quiet in a minute here.**_

"Luke," he mumbled, the vowel bobbing high to low, then back again. Got rewarded with the thump of a pillow smacking him in the face, which wasn't the insult it should have been. It meant that Luke was getting up to deal with that other noise, the one louder than Bo's whining. Which still resembled a goat under duress, if you asked him. Or a siren piercing an otherwise perfect blue-sky day, turning the beautiful world into misery.

The brat in the crib didn't know the difference between dark and light, didn't have a polite bone in his tiny body when it came to what should have been the quiet hours of night. He'd wanted to be fed or changed or just plain held at least once during each of the three nights he'd spent in here. And it wasn't like managing to survive the night was enough, because the kid would do plenty of crying in the daytime too.

Jesse's face curved into a low frown a lot lately, and Bo figured it was mostly aimed at him. But it wasn't his fault that Luke was willing to jump every time the baby squawked, that his big, strong cousin stood ready to take unintelligible orders from a kid that hadn't even been on the planet as long as some of the weeds growing up around the edge of the paddock. It wasn't his fault that Luke had been a good student at their uncle's knee, learning how to get the baby to take a bottle, how to give him a bath and how to change a diaper. And it definitely wasn't Bo's fault that just the thought of doing that last one made him taste hot bile at the back of his throat.

"Take him into the kitchen," Bo mumbled when those goat-strangling noises got louder, punctuated by Luke's sibilant shushing, which was even more annoying than the baby's cries.

"I ought to put him in your bed with you," Luke groused back at him.

And maybe he should. Bo hadn't been nearly as attentive to Jesse's little lessons, though he'd been compelled to sit through them as though he were still in school. (And he'd cared about as much about them as if they were school lessons, too. Which meant he'd learned next to nothing.) But if there was one thing Bo had figured out over a lifetime of being raised by Jesse Duke, it was that Luke was coddling that kid. Every little cry had his cousin wrapping arms around the baby and speaking to it softly. Sometimes even singing. If it were up to Bo, that baby would have had a stern talking-to by now, would have had the rules explained to him. Would have been told that just because he was awake didn't mean everyone else in the house had to be, too.

But Luke didn't drop the baby in the bed for Bo to scold after all, just headed out of the room like he'd been told, closing the door with something less than a gentle click. Within a few seconds there was a shaft of light angling under the bedroom door, which meant Luke was in the kitchen, about to heat a bottle of goat's milk. Which would only lead to another messy diaper in that awful pail on the porch, and if someone would just explain to the kid that breakfast was only about three hours away and he needed to hold on until then, this whole mess could be avoided.

Bo pulled Luke's pillow over his eyes and resolved to go back to sleep. Chores were coming around sooner than he wanted to think about, and since his cousin insisted on continuing to do his share of farm work even as he cared for the baby, Bo had to make sure he kept up with him. Otherwise Jesse'd be tsking at him like he always had when they were kids and Luke was the good and selfless boy who worked hard, while Bo was the lazy brat.

And it wasn't his fault, not any of it from the way Luke volunteered to work extra hard to the fact that Bo just needed more sleep than his cousin ever had.

(But the baby that had taken up residence in their bedroom, well, that might just have been Bo's fault. Unless it was Luke's.)

* * *

"You're spoiling that boy," Jesse informed him over a mug of yesterday's cold coffee. It was a sad state of affairs when the two oldest Duke men didn't have enough energy between them to boil water.

Luke slouched in the armchair, right elbow braced on one of the worn, red armrests, wide fingers wrapped loosely around the end of a bottle. He'd fed enough goat kids in his time that he knew how to hang on, even when the rest of him was closer to asleep than awake.

"If I don't feed him, he'll just cry all night," he mumbled back at the old man across from him.

Of course, a middle-of-the-night feeding didn't necessarily mean the crying would stop. Oh, it'd pause for a greedy, sucking moment or three, but then it'd start right up again before the burping could even begin.

"I ain't talking about that cute little feller," Jesse corrected. The oldster had been relegated to the rocking chair these past few days instead of his usual seat, but he'd taken to it easily enough. Said it reminded him of when he and Lavinia used to sit with little tykes on their laps, waiting for them to cry themselves to sleep. "I'm talking about Bo."

Luke shrugged, closed his eyes and let his mind drift back toward that place it had been before Jesse creaked his way across the floorboards to come and sit with him. The sun would be up in another hour or so and he had fantasies of dozing until then, the baby curled into the crook of his left arm slowly sucking on the bottle and leaving him in peace. It wasn't a likely outcome, but it was worth dreaming about.

"He ought to be out here, too, helping you. Unless you know something I don't about who that baby's papa is."

He was almost, but not quite, tired enough to let that remark slide. As it was, it merited only one open eye, allowing Luke to imagine that he wasn't fully awake. "I don't know nothing about who the daddy is. I reckon there's a chance it's me, but there's a better chance it's Bo." He would have liked to close that eye again and get back to sleep, but the steady sucking rhythm of the baby in his arms changed. The kid was done eating, which meant Luke needed to be on his feet. If the burping went badly and any manner of spit up wound up on the fabric of the one comfortable chair in the house, Daisy would pull out all his hair, strand by painful strand. "What I do know is that this kid needs someone to take care of him, and Bo ain't hardly more than a baby himself." Hmm, that had a nice ring to it. Baby Bo. "He ain't in no condition to be raising nobody, so I reckon I'll do it. If the kid turns out blond, I'll turn him over to Bo when he's ten and can halfway take care of himself."

He set the bottle down on the first flat surface he could find – the high shelf that ran around the edge of the room – and grabbed the burping cloth from the back the chair. Placed it over his shoulder and wondered at the new vocabulary that'd taken hold in his head over the past few days. Burping cloth – heck, last week it was just an old towel. He probably would have thought of it as a potential grease rag then, would have plotted to get it out of the house to wipe his hands after caring for his first baby (his only baby, he mentally corrected himself, because no matter what he said to Jesse, he was pretty sure the kid was Bo's), the General Lee.

"I reckon you're tired," Jesse scolded, pushing himself up from the rocker with a grunt. "Or you'd be doing a mite more thinking before talking that way about your cousin."

The quiet little burp – and thankfully this morning it was no more than that, no need for Luke to find time to get a shower or resign himself to a day of spit up in his hair – came just as his uncle made it across the room, holding out his arms to take the baby from him.

"Come on, Jesse," he defended himself, handing the bundle of baby and blanket over to his uncle, and dropping the burping cloth off on the back of the chair again. "You going to tell me Bo's responsible enough to look after a baby? Heck, he'd rather toss the kid in the back seat of the General and go jumping over every gully he could find."

"Sh-sh-sh," Jesse said, shushing him or the baby – hard to tell which when he was getting loud and the little one was vocalizing something that might turn into a cry any second now. "I reckon both you and me had a hand in Bo being the way he is today. Fun-loving, easy-going and most days you wouldn't have him any other way." Jesse's big old calloused thumb stroked the back of a head with only the lightest fluff of hair covering it. Hard to say whether it would grow in dark or blond, whether the hairline would be high or low. Tiny fingers, already moist and sticky from the last time they'd been there, found mouth and the noises stopped. "But if you figure there's a good chance this child is his, and you're resenting him for not doing his part in taking care of it, well, you ain't got nobody to blame but yourself. You're ain't just making it easy for him to walk away from his responsibilities, you're making it hard for him to get involved when you just jump up and do everything. Raising kids together is a matter of give and take, and you ain't got no give in you anywhere, Luke."

One little blue eye rolled around to look at him, with all the trust in the world. Luke came a step closer – Jesse said that the tyke probably couldn't see very far yet – and forced a smile onto his face. A goofy curve of tiny lips mirrored his, then that eye closed and the baby settled in against Jesse's shoulder for a nap, face still holding that silly shape.

_**Now ain't that just a natural sight, right there? You can just imagine Jesse holding Bo and Luke that way when they was babies. Back before they gave him all them white hairs on his head.**_

"Go get some sleep," Jesse chided. "I'll get you up in time for chores."

Luke headed back to his bedroom, memory of a tiny smile safely stored away in his head. He tried to tell himself that the image was more important than a thousand races on the dirt track or chases over the dusty roads of Hazzard. Wasn't sure he believed it.

* * *

"Luke." Bo had been awakened by calloused hands without any amount of gentleness or sympathy for the fact that it'd been days since he last got a full night's sleep. Mean, old man grumblings in his ears about afternoon naps being for the elderly and well-behaved, neither of which described him. Reminding him of those days in high school when Luke was in the service and he took to sleeping a lot because what else was there to do when his cousin was so far away?

Jesse telling him to get up and do his fair share of the work, which would have been fine. If it had been like the old days and all he was being asked to do was muck out a mule's stall. But it wasn't. He got sent in here to watch Luke feed his son – Luke's son, their son? Someone's son – his lunch. Second, maybe third lunch of the day, because breakfast seemed to happen about two, most mornings. "How come we ain't gone out looking for the mama again?"

His cousin shrugged the one shoulder that Bo was sitting against, as they both huddled tiredly over a baby that seemed perfectly content to be awake. It was nice, maybe, to spend a little time with Luke when everything over the past four days had been brief glimpses of him in between chores and diaper changes and feedings and checking the crops. And the kid had been dragged along for every minute of it because his saintly cousin, ever the good and responsible Duke boy, had taken this edict of Jesse's far too seriously. Sure, the old man said they had to be nurse-mothers to the baby until one of them confessed to being the daddy and did right by the mama. But Daisy had been hanging around the edges of everything Luke did, ready and willing to take over any baby-related activity offered to her.

"You figure you know who she is?" It was one of Luke's tricks, a trap designed to catch Bo in his sleep-deprived state and make him confess to things he wasn't sure he'd done. Or, well – he'd done things. Lots of things and they were fun things, but he had no reason to believe that a baby was the direct consequence of any of those things.

Besides, just look how tidily the kid fit into the crook of Luke's arm, how those eyes looked up at him adoringly as the contents of the bottle disappeared at a steady rate. It would make a lot more sense for the baby to be the consequence of things Luke had done.

"No, I don't figure I know who she is," he answered back hotly, and apparently a little too loudly if the way the baby's face screwed up around the bottle was any indication.

"Shh," Luke hissed at him, which only made the baby's face go red. Tension across Luke's shoulders and all three of them knew that tears were imminent. It was just a question of how many of them would cry. Bo was tired enough to join in with the baby's wails, and Luke might just be, too.

"Rock him," Bo commanded. It was what Jesse'd told them that first day. Gentle, calming movement, like the way a mama's belly would sway when she walked.

He got glared at for being a side-seat driver (which went to prove that Luke could dish it out but not take it) but his cousin complied with all the awkward motion of a man used to throwing punches instead of soothing babies. The kid looked at him suspiciously, but went back to sucking at the bottle with full concentration.

"If you don't know who she is," Luke informed him, "and I sure as heck don't know who she is, then we ain't never going to find her. It ain't like she's still got a round belly. And I reckon she don't want to be found." The baby went back to staring at Luke's face like it was the prettiest thing he'd ever seen. Which went to show that the kid wasn't all that observant when he hadn't even noticed that Bo's much prettier face was right there, too.

He sighed, looked away from the bundle wrapped up in his cousin's arms in that same blanket he'd arrived in, and out the window. Jesse and Daisy were outside in the sunshine right now, tending to the livestock and the garden and whatever else they felt like on a reasonably lazy Friday afternoon. Bo and Luke should be out there, too, shirts off and bent over the General's engine compartment, grease up to their elbows and arguing over whether the fuel mixture was too rich or too lean. And then tomorrow morning they should be heading off to Cooter's garage for doughnuts and beer, but they'd already called and let him know they couldn't come, seeing as how they were tending to a baby. At least for now, and maybe forever. Cooter's laughter at the news had started out disbelieving, then grown wilder until it bordered on hysterical.

"Why would a woman give up her baby and just walk away like that?" he asked.

"Why would a man refuse to take care of his own baby?" Luke snapped back, pointedly. There went that little face, scrunching up again. Luke pulled the bottle away from lips that weren't sucking on it anymore, reached for that nasty towel that followed him around the house wherever he went. Bo shuffled his chair away from his cousin's; it wasn't wise to be too close to what came next. "I don't reckon we'll ever know or agree with why she done what she done, Bo." There it was, the baby getting held up against Luke's chest and patted on the back. Bo slid just a little further away. For such a little thing, the kid sure could manage to make a horrible mess when he was of a mind to. "But like Uncle Jesse done, I reckon it's our job to make sure this little tyke knows that he's loved and that he's a Duke."

Yeah, well. As long as Luke was the one the kid grew up calling _Daddy_.


	4. Week Two: Exhibits and Faults

**Week Two: Exhibits and Faults  
**

_May 9-15, 1982_

The kid was most definitely Bo's.

Sure, there was no way to scientifically prove the fact, and lacking a full confession, Jesse wouldn't go blaming one of his boys over the other. But the evidence was everywhere.

No mother had showed up at the door, crying and apologizing for leaving her helpless infant for the Dukes to find. So come Monday they'd taken the Little Feller (as Jesse had taken to calling him) to Doc Appleby, who looked from Bo to Luke to Daisy to Jesse with raised eyebrows and a tilted head. Waiting for an explanation that was only partial when it came—

"It ain't Daisy's," was about all Jesse had to say on the subject.

"I didn't rightly see how it could have been," Doc had answered back, and wisely he'd left it at that.

The examination had been relatively quick and straightforward – Doc always had been better with adult patients than children – with a check of the heart, lungs, ears, eyes, nose, belly. The baby was pronounced healthy, male (in case they hadn't figured that part out on their own) and approximately two months old, which loosely jibed with Jesse's best guess. There had been the beginnings of a discussion about diet and the benefits of goat's milk over store-bought formula when Little Feller scrunched up his face, followed by a gurgling sound and a distinct smell. Bo immediately distanced himself from the baby. Doc took his own step back, which left them all to question his ability to handle the human fluids that had to be a daily part of his job, and even Jesse wrinkled his nose a bit. Luke sighed, scooped up the 'bundle of joy' and took him into the waiting room where they'd left the duffel bag that held clean diapers.

Which must have cleared up any questions that the doctor must have had about who the kid belonged to, but he was all wrong about that. The baby was Bo's.

The evidence was everywhere and obvious, if a man was to really look.

Exhibit A was in the amount of food he could put away. The goat's milk had been a natural consequence of the kid being hungry from the moment they found him. It wasn't like they'd had any baby food around, but they'd had goats and that was good enough. Jesse said that generations of Dukes had been raised on goat milk and there was no reason to go buying any of that newfangled formula at the store. But after the first day of cooing over him had ended, Daisy had gone downtown to Rhuebottoms anyway and bought him baby bottles to replace the livestock one they'd been using, and two different types of formula. And all manner of little baby clothes, even though Jesse had already dug plenty of hand-me-downs from their own childhoods out of the attic. Daisy also got him a pacifier that he hadn't showed a lick of interest in, some shoes that were to stiff for his tender little feet, and a shiny new rattle that he couldn't even hold. Which had pretty well decimated her tip money, and that led to—

Exhibit B, which was the way the Little Feller already had women twisted around his tiny pinky. Daisy was the first, but there were others. Maisie, who passed as something of a receptionist at Doc Appleby's, though she couldn't type and lost more phone messages than she passed on, had offered to run out and buy the Little Feller right and proper newfangled diapers to replace the cloth ones that were also hand-me-downs from previous generations of Dukes. Luke had refused, knowing the family couldn't afford to keep buying disposable diapers, but he'd let Maisie put the filthy one into the parking lot dumpster all the same, rather than packing it up to take it home. They still had a good couple dozen others, anyway.

But that was exhibit C, the way the Little Feller (Baby Bo, his mind automatically corrected) had no manners whatsoever. He'd make ugly sounds and bad smells wherever he was, with no concern about the company, mixed or otherwise.

And then there was exhibit D. Up partying into the night, then sleeping as late in the day as he could get away with. Which led tidily to exhibit E, the thoughtlessness with which he woke everyone around him, kept them awake until there was no chance of sleeping before chore-time, then fell asleep at dawn, ignoring the work going on around him. Yep, it was Bo's baby and Luke reckoned eventually everyone else would recognize that fact, too. Not that it would matter any, because it would still fall to Luke to raise him. What with how, exhibit F, Bo was about as responsible as a baby, himself.

_**Well, now. I reckon Luke's getting a mite tired and cranky, don't you? Somebody needs to put that boy down for a nap.**_

* * *

It wasn't, he would like to point out to anyone who would listen (which was precisely no one), his fault. Unless it was, but there was no one who could say for sure that it was his fault. The baby, after all, couldn't talk and hadn't been present on the night of his own conception anyway.

Besides, even if the baby was his fault, none of the rest of it was. If he'd known that the girl in question, whoever she might have been, was the type to walk off and abandon her baby on the farmhouse porch, well, Bo never would have gotten with her. (He didn't think, anyway. It was hard to know since he'd never directly asked any girl what she'd do if she got pregnant. It wasn't the type of question a man in the middle of courting wanted to ponder too closely, really.) And it certainly wasn't his fault that Luke was angling to win himself some kind of a nonexistent 'daddy of the year' award. And a simultaneously nonexistent 'farmer of the year' award, because his cousin was never late for chores, even if he did them with a screaming baby in a bassinet on a hay bale just an arm's reach away. And while singing that old Eagles song, _Take it Easy_, because somehow, in Luke's mind, that constituted a lullaby.

Which meant that, no matter how little sleep Bo had gotten the night before, he had no excuse to be late for chores either. Even if Luke was too busy looking after the brat to roust Bo from his bed. And it wasn't Bo's fault that he'd gotten to depending on Luke to do that, either. A lifetime of habit couldn't be broken in the short span of ten days.

It wasn't his fault that Luke had always had that annoying habit of being virtuous, at least when anyone of consequence was watching. Great big sacrifices made in front of witnesses that would pat him on the head and tell him what a good boy he was, then scowl at Bo. The selfish younger cousin with the pretty face and sure, he got his share of head pats, too. But he also got called lazy. Which he wasn't, it was just that Luke was so busy showing off all the time, getting all the work done before Bo could put aside his toys and come do his share. Saint Luke, Bo used to call him, and his cousin hadn't liked it a bit but it hadn't slowed him down from his efforts to prove himself the noblest Duke ever created.

And it definitely wasn't Bo's fault that between the two of them, he and Luke hadn't gotten any more than a few hours of sleep each night. If Luke would stop being such a saint, Daisy could come get the baby in the middle of the night and care for him like she was dying to. Or heck, if the cousins all banded together, Jesse would have to let the kid sleep in Daisy's room to begin with, and then he and Luke wouldn't have to wake up at all when he cried—

"What are you doing here?" And just look at that, Saint Grouch himself with his cheerful good morning greetings, interrupting Bo's cranky thoughts.

Bo plopped down in the kitchen chair next to Luke's – poor thing was too old to be putting up with that kind of abuse. The foggy morning light had to work twice as hard to make it inside through the dust on the windows, but it was enough to reveal the deep lines on Luke's face, the weary squint to his eyes and the heavy slump of his shoulders. The mixed smells of sweet powder and stale coffee did little for Bo's stomach, which was caught somewhere between hungry and upset. "Helping you," he said.

That, apparently, was funny. Luke hadn't had one smile to spare for anyone but the child in his arms (and those weren't real smiles, but the Little Feller didn't know that) and there he was now, head tipped back and laughing hard enough to make the babe consider starting to cry all over again.

"Shh," he counseled, which was exactly the kind of help that Luke was likely to dismiss. But if the kid stopped eating and started screaming again, his cousin would have to start over at the beginning with the shushing and the bouncing, and then there'd be cleaning to do because the baby had the weakest stomach Bo had ever seen.

"Helping me?" Luke asked in a stuttered, hiccupped laugh. The kind that questioned Bo's sanity and his honor as a Duke all at once. It was enough to make a man want to go back to bed – though honestly, there wasn't much that didn't make a man want to go back to bed at this point – and rescind any offer of assistance he might have foolishly made. Except that the morning was getting a little more serious about brightening and Jesse would be up soon. If Bo couldn't make himself relatively useful by then, he would be staring down the double barrel of a Jesse Duke lecture.

"Well, I would, if you wasn't such a stubborn—" jackass, the word was right there on his lips, but it was wrong to curse in front of children. "Jerk about it. It ain't like you've let me help none."

"It ain't like you've really touched Baby Bo here even once," Luke said back to him, sing-song. Trying to keep the baby calm or a straight-out taunt – either way, Bo was done listening to him.

"It ain't," he said, climbing to his feet, finger pointing at Luke's stupid chest with that little baby curled there, looking up at him like he was the biggest clown in the circus. (Jesse said the kid couldn't see that far yet, but Bo knew a sideways glance when he saw one.) "Like you ever put him down for a second so I could," the chair he'd been sitting in tangled around his ankle and headed for the floor. Had to stop pointing at Luke and turn around to catch it before it crashed down hard, which would have made more than the baby scream. Jesse and Daisy would have had a few loud words to say on the subject of sudden noises and broken furniture, too. "Do nothing—" he'd stopped making sense, he knew he had. Luke knew it, too, heck even the baby was wise to that little fact. They looked up at him with matching, half amused expressions, just waiting to see what brilliance he would to come out with next. He stood the chair carefully on its legs, got his finger back out and pointing. "I guess I can understand it," he changed tacks. He wouldn't want to disappoint his rapt audience. (Or give either of them a chance to get a word in edgewise.) "You don't want no one else touching Little Luke, there."

The smirk on Luke's face was anything but amused. The shift of his body was reminiscent of a dozen different nights in the Boar's Nest. Some stranger saying one too many words about Daisy's shorts, maybe reaching out a hand with intent to find that spot where denim turned to skin, and Luke would be on his feet like there was a spring under his backside. Except he couldn't this time. Not unless he planned to drop the baby onto the table like a simple mug of beer.

And the stale coffee smell was fading away, the sweet powder mutating into something else. Something decidedly unpleasant.

"Oh, that's rich, Bo. You won't look after your own kid," who had turned away from the bottle, his face going pink and a small bubble forming between his lips, "which means I have to, and you're going to complain that I won't let you touch him?" Kind of a strange twist to the baby's mouth, not really a smirk after all. Little eyes closed and wrinkles forming everywhere. "Well, here," Luke said, looking down and realizing that the bottle was dribbling, unwanted, onto the blanket. "You can have him."

The air began to smell downright putrid.

"Just finish feeding him," Bo snapped back. The kid was starting to look singularly unhappy, and any second now, he was going to cry. Better he be in Luke's arms if that was going to happen.

Though apparently Luke didn't agree with that idea and stood perfectly ready to hand the whole disaster over to him. Like a hot potato that no one wanted to get stuck with, the kid was being held up now, an untidy package that Bo was supposed to grab.

A squirting sound, and the kitchen smelled worse than Maudine's stall on a hot morning. The baby's face relaxed out of all those wrinkles and Bo would swear they were replaced by a smile of relief. For second, anyway.

"Now look what you made him do," Bo said.

"What I made him do?" Luke laughed back at him, but that hot potato was clearly getting hotter by the second. Burning his fingers and he was beyond ready to hand it over. Not that it would do any good if he did. Bo was pretty sure that the smell was going to keel them both over in a second. Best thing Luke could do would be to put the baby down. But where? Not on the kitchen table—"Bo Duke, you are an idiot."

The screaming started then, the kid putting in his two cents over which of them was the idiot and furthermore announcing that he was even closer to the smell than either one of them. Which couldn't be any too pleasant.

"Well, good morning to you three, too," Daisy greeted from the doorway, far too cheerfully. A twist of a smile on her face, perfectly happy to find her two male cousins at odds with a clearly dirty baby all but dangling in the air between them.

"What in tarnation is all that racket?" Jesse groused from somewhere behind her, probably making his lumbering way down the hall.

Luke raised an eyebrow at Bo, like he was daring him to explain the details of the argument. Which, naturally, would have made Bo look bad and Luke look saintly, so he said nothing. And that worked just fine, when Little Luke's hollers would have drowned out his words anyway.

"Aw, I'll take the Little Feller," Daisy cooed, stepping forward and grabbing the stinky bundle just in time for Jesse to make it into the archway. The old man's nose wrinkled in recognition of at least half of what the racket was. He took a step back to give Daisy a clear path out of the kitchen. "You poor, sweet thing you," the girl mumbled, holding the baby closer than was advisable, what with the toxic waste in its diapers and all.

"She got that about a third right," Bo mumbled.

Luke raised an eyebrow at him and Daisy made show of ignoring him and fussing over the baby. That girl was going to spoil him even worse than Luke. No one ought to be encouraging the kid to make another one of those smells.

"Go on," Jesse told her, and Bo would swear his voice sounded just a bit strained. Or maybe pinched, like he was refusing to breathe through his nose. Which seemed like a good idea and Bo commenced to doing the same. "Take care of him."

Daisy finally made her way out of the room, her bare feet hitting the floor in notably slow, retreating slaps.

"Reckon we should see to the chores," Jesse counseled, pointing to the front door and utterly ignoring the fact that they were still in pajamas and not a one of them was wearing shoes. Felt like a perfectly reasonable suggestion all the same, so they followed him out. The cool morning air set goose bumps to popping up on any exposed skin (and considering he was just in pajama pants and Luke only wore boxers, that was a lot of skin) but it smelled of spring flowers and goat manure, which was an extraordinary improvement.

The ruse of doing chores died right there on the porch – it wasn't wise to go off to the barn without proper footwear after all – so the three of them drew in heavy breaths and pretended that they weren't strong, healthy men who had just run away from a tiny baby with a dirty diaper.

_**Well, I don't know about y'all, but I reckon I'd've moved pretty quickly myself.**_

"This don't mean," Jesse said, cocking his thumb back in the general direction of the kitchen (and they really should open the door to air it out, but that would let the smell out here with them) and Daisy beyond, "that you two ain't going to figure out some way to take care of that baby. Together, unless one of you is willing to make some sort of a confession right here and now."

His eyes met Luke's; there was no give there whatsoever.

"I reckon we'll figure out how to handle it, Uncle Jesse," he said and he didn't believe the words one little bit.

* * *

_I'll take care of the feeding if you take care of the gross stuff_, Bo had said.

Of course he would; feeding involved food and Bo liked his food. So did Baby Bo and Luke figured that his cousin's vow to take care of the feeding would last until the first time the baby got hungry in the middle of the night. Which meant it would most likely last for no more than eighteen hours. Shorter if any post-meal burps went wrong, because that verged on gross stuff (but was very definitely a part of agreeing to do the feeding, as far as Luke was concerned).

In the meantime it was interesting to stand back and watch Bo try to do his part. Which took a couple of hours to come along, because of course Bo pronounced himself willing to help not five full minutes after the early morning feeding (and diaper change, which Luke really needed to thank Daisy for) had been completed. But the baby, being a baby (and furthermore Bo's baby) got hungry before lunch, so the distance between Bo's promise and his readiness to deny ever having made such a promise was reasonably short.

"He don't even," Bo stammered from his seat on the couch, his elbows jutted sharply out to the sides, the baby cradled stiffly in the tight crook of his left arm. "What's he crying for?"

"He's hungry," Luke answered with a shrug. It would have been nice, downright thoughtful and cousinly, to have helped Bo with the task. To show him how to get a human baby to take the bottle, but that would mean crowding him. Making him feel like – what was it Bo had said this morning? Like Luke didn't want anyone else touching the baby.

"He ain't hungry," Bo groused back. "He won't even, he don't want the bottle."

"He ain't a goat," Luke offered. The red chair, he'd just figured out, was incredibly comfortable when he didn't have to worry about a baby in his arms. When he could lean back and relax everywhere from his hair to his toes, and watch someone else take care of Baby Bo for a while.

"I know he ain't a goat, Luke."

That was excellent news. Bo could tell his own son from a goat. Which must mean that he wasn't half as tired as Luke was, because he wasn't yet having hallucinations.

"He don't eat like a goat, neither." Luke let his eyes drift closed. Bo would figure it out eventually, or—

"Here, sugar, you do it like this." Luke smiled to himself, hearing his female cousin come from the kitchen for the sole purpose of butting in. Lord alone knew what took her so long to get herself involved.

"Daisy," Bo snapped, and there was a little father-son duet going on over there on the couch, both complaining about the lousy way this little project was working out. Luke opened one eye to make sure that poor Baby Bo wasn't getting yanked back and forth between his two cousins in some sort of human tug of war, but it wasn't that bad. Yet. "Let me—"

"Bo," she complained right back at him and it was a soprano trio over there, the three of them trying to out-holler each other. "If you'd just let me—"

She didn't finish the sentence and none of them needed her to. It was the same battle of wills he'd been watching his entire life. Bo never could stand for Daisy to tell him a single thing, even when she did know better than him. On a good day, he'd ignore everything she had to say. On a bad day—

"Bo," Uncle Jesse growled. "Daisy!" He'd been in the kitchen, most likely resolved to pretending to read his paper and otherwise letting Bo work things out on his own. He might have been counting on Luke to be more helpful, but that was just too bad. Heavy footsteps marching over old, creaking floorboards and Luke closed his eye again. Figured that his attention, as little of it as there was, no longer needed to be on his cousins. Jesse would sort it out. "Now Daisy," the oldster said in that voice that forced itself to be calm and explain things nicely. "I reckon it would be best if you went back in there and shelled them peas." Sounded like some manner of protest from the girl, but then again, it was hard to say, what with Baby Bo's growing screams. If his uncle wasn't already on the job, Luke would have pulled himself out of the chair at this point. The kid sounded miserable. "Just go and do what I said," Jesse counseled. More feet stomping across the floor. Less bodyweight but a great deal more frustration behind the sound. "Now, Bo," the oldster explained, "what Luke there said was right." A quiet smile drifted across his face. "Even if he was a jackass in how he said it." And then flattened out just as quickly. Luke resolved to himself to fall asleep before his honor could be further impugned. (It was only a matter of time.) "This here Little Feller—"

"Little Luke," Bo corrected. It didn't take open eyes to tell that that pretty face was distorted into a sneer. The sound of his voice was enough.

"Little Feller," Jesse insisted. "He ain't like a goat. He ain't going to chase your hand around after the bottle. You got to get him interested in it."

"If he ain't interested, he ain't hungry," Bo stated, intent, it seemed, on convincing them all that there was no need for him to stick to his vow. The baby simply didn't need Bo's help, he was self-feeding.

"Now that ain't so," Jesse told him, quiet and calm in that way that made it hard to tell which of the two babies he was trying to soothe.

A metallic clunk came from the kitchen, a clear statement of resentment. "Oops," Daisy mumbled, but she didn't mean it.

Jesse ignored the interruption and set to teaching Bo how to properly hold a baby, how to relax so the kid would stay calm and trusting, how to press the bottle gently against that tiny cheek so the little guy would turn toward it and take it. Somewhere in there the crying stopped, the talking became more of a whisper, and Daisy gave up her wordless tantrum with one more abrupt clang. And in this blissful peace, Luke fell asleep.

He couldn't have been out for more than a couple of minutes – there was no aroma of a partially cooked lunch greeting his nose – when his foot got cheerfully tugged on, not once but twice. Ignoring it was deemed the best policy, at least until the disgustingly smug voice of his cousin greeted him with far too much glee.

"I done my part," it said. "Come on, Little Luke needs a fresh diaper."

He sighed, opened one eye to see the child dangling in front of him, held up under the arms like Bo didn't much want to touch him.

"He really done?" Luke called past his cousin to where Jesse was still sitting on the couch. There was no crying, but the little face in front of his wasn't happy, either. And he was pretty sure he didn't trust Bo's judgment on the matter.

"He's really done," Bo answered, that annoyingly proud smile flattening down. "And he's really wet, too." Luke had to open his other eye and crane his neck a bit to see around where his cousin was taking up most his field of vision, but doing so revealed a white head, nodding agreement. Over the course of a week and half, Bo had managed to do one thing for the kid that was surely his, and both he and Jesse were so proud about it that it just about made Luke sick.

"Get yourself and _Baby Bo_ out of the way, then, so I can get up." Bo's straight-line lips bent into a frown about that – he had all the intentions in the world of letting go of the kid now that the very basics of his part of the bargain had been completed.

Jesse's face was as displeased as Bo's. "Give him room, Bo," he commanded. "Then he'll take the _Little Feller_ from you." The old man was nothing if not stubborn; he wasn't going to choose sides, even if Bo and the baby had identical frowns on their faces now and there was no doubt at all who was responsible for every little bit of the mess they were in.

Thing was, it didn't matter. Not really. The mess existed and there was nothing to do but deal with it. So Luke pulled himself to his feet and took hold of the little guy. He was wet, all right, and so was Luke as soon as he pulled the baby close to him. He couldn't swear he liked the feeling one bit, but the baby snuggled in close and warm and trusting, so what else could he do?

His memories of his own parents were sepia and sketchy, worn thin with age. Limited to feelings almost more than visions – the size of his father's hand against the back of his head, rough calluses catching in his hair, the softness of his mother's dresses, the warmth of her skin. The big boots he'd put on his feet that belonged to his father or one of his uncles, the way they'd clomp on the floor as they just about dropped off his little feet with every shuffling step he took, his mother's laughter when he announced that he was going off to hunt up a deer for dinner. His father's proud hands scooping him up, the boots thudding uselessly to the floor, the hardness of the hug, so different from being held in his mother's or aunts' arms, clothes smelling of wood smoke and something bitter, something he'd eventually come to know as moonshine mash. Even if he didn't know what the odor was, he knew what it meant to smell it. He was a Duke, he was proud and strong and resilient, and most of all he was loved.

So he held wet bundle close and took it into the bedroom with him, even if it meant getting fluids he'd rather not think too hard about on his shirt and the skin beneath. He laid the kid out on the ironing-board-turned-changing-table that Daisy had brought in for them that first day. Took the old diaper off, put his left arm gently across that tiny body to make sure the baby stayed put, started fishing around with his right hand to find the diaper that he knew was piled up on the chair next to him, and the kid let loose. Warm spray of urine everywhere, Luke's shirt, skin, hair and the bed beyond.

He didn't like being wet, didn't like taking his second shower of the day, changing his shirt or the sheets on his bed. Didn't like that this was what his life would be like from now on, didn't like how that not liking made him feel like a terrible man and an impatient parent, but it all needed to be done, anyway. Because the kid was a Duke and he deserved to know that, even if he wasn't expected, he was still wanted. Still loved.


	5. Week Three: An Unregistered Baby

**Week Three: An Unregistered Baby  
**

_May 16-22, 1982_

_**Well, friends, time and tide wait for no man, even if he's one of two men trying to look after a baby. Day still follows night, whether anyone's slept a wink, and crops still grow in the fields. And look there, if there ain't a pair of boys out there in them fields. Though it don't look like they could possibly be doing much of anything like work, considering that they can barely manage to lift their feet off the ground. If that little one don't start sleeping through the night soon, I reckon all three of them Duke boys is headed for the great junkyard in the sky.**_

It was a fine morning, or it ought to have been. Cool for May, sky full of puffy clouds lined up like biscuits in a tin, the sun putting in a good effort to break through and only managing the occasional weak ray. Just enough to catch on the hip high, bright green corn leaves and turn them into something out of a painting. The kind of day poets wrote about and singers sang about, the kind of day that made school children cry at the end of recess when they had to go back inside to their desks.

And that, Bo assured himself with a silent nod, was where children belonged. Inside, being watched over by schoolmarms and nannies. They did not, Bo was quite certain, belong out on the fields with him and Luke.

About sixty days into the growing cycle, the corn was looking pretty good. It had been dry, but as long as long as it rained soon the crop wouldn't be stunted. No sign of blight, not too many holes in the leaves. Easy duty; he and Luke should be able to finish checking the lines and spraying Jesse's homemade flea beetle remedy in strategic places before lunch. Then they'd have the rest of the day to themselves, or they should. But they didn't even have this part of the day to themselves.

Luke was moving at about half his normal pace, leaning at an odd angle and singing as he went. Turning over leaves to look for cutworms or aphids while serenading a bundle tied around his neck and shoulder in a blanket-turned-baby-sling. Something endless and tuneless about what daddy was gonna buy his baby. As if daddy had a nickel to spare.

Bo liked the Eagles song better, even if he was getting sick of it by now.

They should have left the baby back at the house. It would have been easy to do and Jesse would have allowed it, too. At least that was what Bo figured, but Luke didn't even ask. Didn't do much of anything except pack the cab of the pickup with a pile of diapers and wipes, a cooler full of bottles and the pacifier that the kid still hadn't shown any real interest in. Then he'd fashioned the sling-thing he was wearing out of one of the smaller blankets from the top shelf of their closet, and tucked Little Luke inside. And when Bo had asked him what in heck he thought he was doing, he'd shrugged and said that Jesse and Lavinia used to slog Bo around the fields in the same way when he was a baby.

"That's true," Jesse had agreed and it had sealed the deal. Except that Bo hadn't made any dumb deal, hadn't shaken hands or signed a piece of paper and damn it all, it should have been a fine morning, a perfect day. "There wasn't no leaving you behind, not ever. Less'n you was with me or Lavinia or Luke, you'd holler."

It was an adorable story, he was sure. Yet another reason for Jesse to remind him that he wasn't easy as a baby, either, and yet his aunt and uncle would never have given up a second of it. The same things the old man been saying every time he sat heavily against Bo's shoulder while he fed the kid. Watching, maybe, to make sure he did it right, talking to pass the time, or to remind him that the hand that held Bo's baby bottle hadn't belonged to his mother but some more distant family member who'd loved him all the same.

He knew all of that, of course. He also knew that Jesse and Lavinia wanted to take care of him. Just like Daisy and Luke wanted to take care of this baby, and that was fine with Bo. They could do it; there was no need for him to get involved.

But he'd been compelled to drive the pickup out here all the same, even if they could have walked. Should have walked, had walked every time they'd come out here before, because it wasn't all that far from the house. Unless, of course, you were lugging a wet baby back and forth.

Luke was half a row behind him now, voice fading with distance. Maybe he missed hearing his cousin's normal singing voice, rough and strong, not laced with gentleness. Maybe he missed chiming in with his own harmonies. Maybe he wanted to hustle through today's work in the fields, then jump into the General with Luke and head for Hazzard Pond or Hound Dog Lake and fish, or just sit on the bank and play their guitars. Maybe he was sick of getting sighed at, snapped at, told that there were things they didn't have time to do anymore. Maybe he resented the way this one little baby had made his way into every crack and crevice in their lives. Maybe he had a pretty good idea that it made him a bad person to think that way, but he couldn't help it.

_**Naw, Bo ain't a bad person. Just one that ain't never really thought about having kids before, and now there's one mixed into everything he does. It ain't easy on no one, Bo.**_

He looked back at Luke and saw his cousin, who was never big on doing anything silly, making exaggerated faces with puffed cheeks and bugged eyes just to entertain a two-and-a-half-month-old. Frowned, turned away and continued his progress up the row of corn.

* * *

Quiet. That was the thing, more than the sun breaking through the clouds or the spices on Daisy's fried chicken, that made the meal wonderful. The bassinet was set in the shade of the oak overhanging the picnic table, and there was no sound coming from it other than the quiet breaths of a sleeping baby. The four adults sat where more sun could reach them, just an arm's length from the little one, making no more noise than it took to whisper a request that the peas be passed. It was a beautiful moment.

Broken (naturally, because nothing valuable ever stayed intact when there were Dukes around) by the shrieking peal of a siren. Luke felt the bench shift under him with the sudden lack of weight, as Bo's instincts pulled him his feet and one-two steps closer to the General. Across from him, Daisy hopped up and ran toward the sound with her arms waving, like she could deter the Hazzard law with just that little. Luke turned toward the bassinet with intent to scoop up and comfort the baby, only to find that Jesse had beaten him there. Furthermore, the old man was wrapping one practiced hand around the back of that tiny head, thumb and forefinger each covering one little ear.

The cries from the baby harmonized with the whine of the siren, offset by Bo's _dang it!_ when he realized that he and Luke weren't going to run from the law this time. The baby came first, last, and everywhere in between, and they had to protect him just as Jesse had protected them when they were little. Their uncle had faced down bears, snakes and armed revenuers with equal resolve to keep his little ones safe, and now Bo and Luke had to do the same.

"It's Rosco!" from Daisy confirmed what they already knew based on the pitch of the siren. The dusty cruiser creaked and groaned its discontent at being manhandled across the Dukes' farmyard, narrowly missing a chicken.

_**You know, the fact that that chicken's still walking around at all says more about the chicken's agility than Rosco's driving skills.**_

"Get out of his way, Daisy," Jesse growled, which only made for louder cries coming from the child in his arms. "And tell him to turn that dang—" Rosco's brakes squealed him to a stop close enough to the tree to scrape off a small chunk of bark, and his siren silenced. "Siren off," Jesse mumbled. "It's all right there, Little Feller," he added, sing-song. "It's just the law. They make a lot of noise, but they ain't nothing to worry about. They ain't got as many brains as the good Lord gave a gnat."

_**Now, Jesse can be downright poetic when he wants to, can't he? Mighty honest, too.**_

"Rosco!" Daisy snapped, hands popping to her hips and ready to dole out a lecture or feign a fainting spell, whichever seemed more appropriate to the development of the situation.

The sheriff paid her no mind and set to navigating his way out of the car, berating the tree for jumping into his way, as Hazzard's trees were wont to do. Luke stepped forward and though Bo's unhappiness hung as heavy in the air as summer humidity, he did the same. The two of them closed ranks between Rosco and the bundle in Jesse's arms.

"You Duke boys, you just, you—"

But it was Bo's child after all, which meant there was no hiding him, not with the fuss he was making over his interrupted nap.

"Oo-oo," Rosco echoed the kid's hollers, clearly having a bit of trouble shifting his brain from first to second.

"Double clutch it, Rosco," Luke suggested, and Bo giggled. It might just have been the first normal moment they'd shared since that morning they found the squalling baby on their doorstep.

"Is that a, that's a, oo-ee-oo…" Rosco made to stride around them and get a better look at the little noisemaker, but Bo sidestepped into his way. "Gij! Oo!"

"Did you want something, Rosco?" Bo asked him, polite as apple pie and flaunting a smile about as believable as a three dollar bill.

"That's a baby," Rosco informed them.

"Where?" Luke asked, coloring his tone the same shade of innocence that he'd once used to convince revenuers that he'd never even _heard_ of moonshine, much less transported it anywhere. Never mind that the kid was still announcing himself at the top of his lungs.

(Bo's baby, and there was no one that could deny it.)

"Rosco," Daisy started in again, even as the man in question tried to peer around the breadth of Bo's chest. "What do you think you're doing, coming in here and ruining my picnic lunch?"

"Lunch?" Rosco echoed, forgetting about the baby for a moment. His nose wrinkled, but there wasn't a whole lot left to smell. Maybe a few peas on someone's plate, which wouldn't amount to much compared to the feasts Boss Hogg paraded through the courthouse on any given day. A frown formed on the sheriff's face; another tasty meal had slipped by his hungry stomach.

"And I've got a double chocolate cake in the oven. If you made my cake fall with all this noise you've been making…" which didn't even make any sense, when the cake was inside and Rosco was outside and in between was a baby who could make more noise than any of them.

Didn't matter. "Cake?" Rosco hadn't heard anything after that word anyway.

"Sure, sugar," Daisy agreed. Scolding done, she was now the perfect picture of farm girl hospitality. "If you want to come inside, we can see if it's done."

"Uh, Daisy," Bo interrupted, sounding as guilty as a confessed criminal. "That might not be such a great idea." Luke wanted to elbow him to make him shut up but then again, Rosco wasn't paying either of the Duke boys a lick of attention right now. Even if they were shuffling awkwardly to the side as the sheriff followed Daisy, trying at all times to block any view he might have of Jesse and the baby.

Bo's son, who, just like his daddy, never did know when to shut up. He just kept right on fussing until even a man as dumb as Rosco couldn't miss him.

"That's a baby," their intrepid sheriff stopped his intense consideration of cake to announce.

"No it ain't," Luke countered.

"Don't you tell me that ain't a baby," Rosco argued, advancing on them again. "I know a baby when I hear one and that's a baby. That's a—gyu!" He made another attempt to peer around or between the stubborn bodies in his way.

Luke did elbow Bo that time. "He's just got the hiccups. Bo, quit hiccupping," which Bo, ever the ham when it came time to play a little shuck and jive, punctuated with a squawk worthy of a sick chicken. "You're confusing Rosco."

"I ain't confused," the sheriff insisted, finger out and pointing straight at Bo's chest. "That's a baby." Luke was halfway proud of him for finally getting something right.

Bo, of course, disagreed. He tipped his head down, blond bangs practically covering his eyes, and stared at the little indent Rosco's finger was making in the blue cloth of his tee shirt. "I ain't no baby, Rosco."

"No, not—gij-oo," Rosco said, pulling his finger back and working his brain through its gears again. Too bad they were stripped. Baby, Bo, hiccups, cake – so many thoughts to sort out. "You can't fool me." Yes, they could, and did so frequently, too. "There's a baby. There's a—"

"All right, boys," Jesse said and though he was behind them, Luke could just about see those old, faded-blue eyes rolling. "Leave him be. Yes, Rosco, there's a baby."

Luke shrugged and gave way. There wasn't really any reason Rosco couldn't know about the baby; it had just been instinct to protect him.

_**Well, Luke, the way I see it, that's good practice for the future. If that-there Duke boy grows up anything like you and Bo, you're going to have your hands full just trying to keep the law away from him. And your old uncle will be smiling at the way karma works.**_

"I know there's a baby," the sheriff answered, pushing past the younger Dukes. "You don't have to tell me there's a baby. Oh, that smarts," he mumbled, stumbling over the end of the picnic table bench. "Would have killed ten ordinary men," he added, bending to rub the shin he'd just barked. "I knew there was a baby," he resumed.

Mother hen Daisy shadowed Rocso until the two of them had crowded in on Jesse.

"Noisy little cuss, ain't he," Rosco observed and got scolded by Daisy again. "Well, he is. Cute as the dickens, though. Gij!" The kid set to screaming again.

"That's Baby Bo," Luke introduced, to an immediate, wordless protest from the baby's grown up counterpart.

"Baby Bo-bo," Rosco cooed, finger poking at the opening in the pale blue and green blanket the baby was wrapped up in. "Gitchee-gitchee goo!" he added in a high, irritatingly cheerful voice. "He does," the sheriff interrupted his own silly noises and turned back toward Bo. "He does kind of favor…"

"No he doesn't," Bo snapped. "He ain't mine, that's Little Luke. You can tell by the way he pretends to be a saint." Oh, Bo used to call him that when they were kids. Any time some adult would comment that Luke sure was growing up to be a fine young man, that he was mature or that it was nice how he looked after his younger cousins, Bo would wrinkle up his freckled little nose and sneer a _Saint Luke_ at him. "But he's really just crafty. Sneaky." Bo offered up a snide grin that was worthy of his ten-year-old self.

Jesse shot them both a dark look, but with his arms full of baby there wasn't a whole lot he could do about their bickering. Especially with Rosco practically crawling into his arms to get a closer look.

"Gij, you're just as cute as a button!" Besides, the little one was settling a little now, no longer screaming about the siren that had woken him up, more like sniveling at the strange blue blob that was somehow speaking to him in his own language. "Ij, oo!"

"Hey, look, Luke! I think Rosco's finally found a friend!" Bo was all smiles about that development.

That snapped Rosco out of the deep and meaningful discussion he'd been having with the baby. Who, for once, wasn't answering back with screams, but blue-eyed, silent fascination.

"You boys got a license for this here unregistered baby?" the ever-vigilant sheriff asked, turning back to face them.

"You don't need a license for a baby," Daisy argued, but Rosco wasn't going to be deterred from solving this very perplexing case.

"The law definitely states that a baby has to be… gyu…" A distracting babble came from the blue-and-green bundle in their uncle's arms.

"I don't need no license," Bo informed him, taking a step back like maybe he planned to run off in the General Lee after all. "Not for that baby. He's Luke's, not mine."

Rosco's eyes took on that dull cast that they always did when information went past too quickly for him to keep up.

"He ain't mine," Luke answered, folding his arms across his chest and holding his ground. "He's Bo's. But that don't matter none, because there ain't no such thing as a license for a baby."

"But!" Rosco protested automatically, his face brightening and eyebrows lifting with the excitement of the confrontation. Until he remembered that he had no idea what he was talking about. "Gyu."

"He ain't mine, Luke." Ideas of retreat forgotten, Bo marched toward him, pointer outstretched. "He ain't and you'd better—"

"Boys!" Jesse hollered and the kid let out a pealing cry to explain how unwanted an angry great-uncle was. Rosco set to muttering about the poor little critter while Jesse glowered at the two of them for their misbehavior and making him upset his grandchild, or as close to one as a childless man could get.

"Well," Luke offered sensibly, "maybe Rosco can help us with that. What do you think, Rosco, which one of us does he look like?"

Bo took a step to stand next to him, heat of his shoulder against Luke's. Puffed out his chest and stood up tall like it was some kind of a beauty contest. Smiled as pretty as he could and asked, "Yeah, Rosco, who do you figure Little Luke there looks like?" Which was cheating.

"Better yet, whose yodeling voice does Baby Bo's there resemble?"

Jesse wasn't getting any happier with them, and they were likely to have to pay for that later. But the only threat he could offer without upsetting the bundle in his arms all over again came in the form of lowered eyebrows and a headshake.

"Well," Rosco said, standing right in the middle of this family squabble and for once realizing exactly how much peril he really was in. "He's, you're—" Pointing to one of them then the other, then turning back to the baby and Jesse's dark look. "I reckon Little Bloke there is—he's both of yours, right?" he asked like it was a trick question on a school test and he was waiting to receive his A for effort.

_**Rosco might just need a refresher course on the birds and the bees. Though I don't reckon there's anyone in the whole county that'd be willing to teach them to him. **_

Bo stepped away from his place at Luke's shoulder and shook his head in dismay. As usual, the law had offered him no reprieve from a lifetime sentence.

"Rosco," Jesse interrupted with a gentleness he'd never use if he wasn't trying to keep an infant calm at the same time. "Was there some reason you come by?"

"Was there—was—was—there was!" The cranks of Rosco's mind spun until they finally turned over. "All right you Dukes!"

The baby let out a cry at being lumped in with the rest of the fools around him. (Or at the way the big, funny-talking, blue blob turned out to be as apt to holler as the rest of them were.) Daisy's hands snapped to her hips like she was getting set to scold Rosco all over again.

"You're—not under arrest, not yet," Rosco decided. Maybe his heart had been softened by his discussion with the ten-week-old who probably understood him better than anyone else. "But you will be!" Or maybe not. "If you ain't off this property by midnight tonight."

There was nothing quite as impressive as all the Dukes talking at once, interrupting each other and generally expressing unhappiness. Add the soprano note of a wailing baby to the top and it was its own cascading opera.

"Hold it! Hold it now all of you!" So much for Jesse being quiet and gentle. Must have figured there were some things more important than keeping the baby calm. "What in tarnation are you talking about, Rosco?"

The sheriff stepped back and looked distinctly uncomfortable. "Boss said—"

"I don't care what J.D. said, we ain't going nowhere," Jesse argued, advancing, making Rosco backtrack even further. "Not for any reason," he took another step, and all but shoved the fussy blue-and-green bundle into Luke's arms so he could march right up into Rosco's face. "And you can just go back and tell your boss that."

"Gyu," summed up all of Rosco's thoughts and gumption in a single word. The sheriff looked side-to-side like a cornered beast, but there was nothing there but chickens. No fat man in white, half-hidden in a cloud of cigar smoke to tell him what to say or to do next. "Boss says he's gonna, he's gonna repossess your farm, lock stock and barn come midnight, because you didn't pay—"

"Our mortgage got paid two days early, Rosco," Bo countered. "I delivered it myself." Yes, he had, and quite gleefully, too, since it got him out of a mid-morning feeding. "I still got the receipt inside the house. Hold on," he added, jogging a couple of steps toward the house.

"That don't matter none," Rosco crowed, making Bo stop and turn back to the rest of them. "Because it ain't your mortgage that you're delinquent on." The sheriff was regaining his bearings and cheery sense of power. "It's your property taxes."

Jesse took yet one more step forward, his red face right up in Rosco's. "I paid my taxes," he snarled, and Rosco leaned back like Jesse was a rabid dog with intent to take a bite-sized chunk out of the most conveniently-placed lawman. "My taxes to the U.S. of A. government, my taxes to the great state of Georgia and my taxes to the county of Hazzard."

Rosco's hands started to fiddle in the air in front of him, a sign that he was close to running his sniveling self back to town to nurse the wounds of a battle lost.

"Well that may be, Jesse," or maybe not. The tone was a little too smug, the corner of his mouth a little too curled. "But you didn't pay your taxes to the _village_ of Hazzard."

Luke laughed; he figured it was too stupid to even get upset about. Bo, of course, disagreed, but then he could get upset about burned biscuits. He marched right back up to join in the argument.

"Rosco, we ain't even in the village of Hazzard. Heck, the village don't go no further in this direction than Elm Street!" Which was only one block west of the square and the courthouse.

"Oh," Rosco said. Looked from side to side again for backup and found that the chickens were still there, and furthermore, they were starting to eye him with suspicion. "Oh! But," he was giddy again in a heartbeat and a giddy Rosco was never a good sign. "That was before Boss moved the border. Now it goes clear to Iron Mountain!"

_**Well, now. Boss moving himself from his own kitchen to his living room practically takes a front-end loader. But it seems like he can move the edges of a whole village with just a wave of his pen.**_

"Moved the border!" That was Daisy, who might as well be Bo's twin for all that she was easy to rile. "He can't do that. Can he Uncle Jesse?"

Bo slung an arm around her shoulders. "Now, don't get upset Daisy. Me and Luke will go into town and take care of this. Come on, Luke." He let go of Daisy and took those two steps toward the General again.

Luke looked at the baby in his arms, then back at Bo. At Rosco, then Jesse.

"No, Bo," the old man said. "Me and Daisy will take care of this. You and Luke stay here and look after Little… Bloke, there," he said, settling on the name Rosco had blurted earlier, since it seemed to blame both boys equally for the presence of the newest charge in their lives. "Come on, girl, let's get moving."

In a few hustled moves, Rosco was in his cruiser and Daisy and Jesse were in Dixie, racing to see who could get to town and Boss Hogg first, and leaving nothing but a cloud of dust to choke the three boys that were left in their wake.

* * *

"It really wasn't that big of a deal," Daisy said for maybe the third or fifth time. "We just had to figure out what Boss was up to," which was acquiring the Duke land for auctioning to the higher bidder – both a grocery store chain and a brewery were interested, which meant they could both afford to pay outrageous sums. "Who else was involved," that might have been a little trickier, considering it all started with an illegal annexation request, approved at a nonexistent public meeting. As usual, Boss kept two sets of books, one with minutes from real meetings approved by Judge Druten and stamped with the county seal. The second book contained fictitious meeting minutes that were signed in a looping hand that seemed to say 'Judge Rufus' and stamped with a slightly blurred seal. "And whether we could stop it from happening." The book of fake meeting minutes was used to draw up a resolution for the village of Hazzard to annex all the unincorporated property in Hazzard County west of the Conasauga River, which was again signed by the fancy hand of 'Judge Rufus.' While Rosco had been sent in one direction to tell the Dukes to start packing, Cletus had been sent in the other, toward Atlanta, to register the resolution and get the official seal of the state stamped onto it. "And then we just had to catch Cletus."

That was the part where insult turned to injury. Because there'd been a chain of cars racing along Route 71 that had multiplied like rabbits from two to four to six. Three of those cars had armed occupants, but only one was shooting. Cooter had been called into the middle of the chase to support Jesse and Daisy, who were outnumbered, and the whole bunch of them had ended up in a heap on the Hazzard/Sweetwater line. Stopped short by Chief Lacey and his reasonably competent staff of officers, the Hazzard law was forced to arrest the driver of the sixth vehicle, who had a gun with empty chambers and a warm muzzle. And turned out to be one Steven Alfred Rufus, one-time member of Black Jack Bender's infamous gang, and one of the few that had escaped the mass arrest a few years back. Nicknamed 'The Judge' because he was known for handling petty squabbles within the gang, and he could have lived out his life in peace and relative prosperity if Boss Hogg hadn't called him in for one last job. The annexation paperwork had been shredded and eaten by Boss Hogg to keep straight-shooting Chief Lacey from reading it.

Most of the story, Bo knew before his kin staggered home after dark to tell it. He'd sat in the kitchen, grumpily listening to CB broadcasts and pouting. At least that was what Luke called it when he told Bo to just go ahead and run off after the whole bunch of them in the General. It was silly to stay home and be miserable when it only took one of them to tend to the baby anyway. But after only a second or two of considering it, Bo had shaken his head and gone to sit next to Luke on the couch. A chase wasn't much fun without his cousin at his side.

"What did you boys do with your afternoon?" Wasn't it sweet of Daisy to ask, after she'd stoically eaten the dinner that Bo had spent a ridiculous amount of time cutting and mixing and boiling on the stove. Some kind of stew, even he didn't know what to call it. All he knew was that he didn't want Luke doing the cooking.

"We worked on the General," Luke offered, and that was the truth. If, that was, you could call it work when they set the sleeping baby and his bassinet on the porch for a few minutes, then popped open the hood to stare blankly at the engine compartment. Luke had fiddled with a couple of hoses, pronounced them sound, then they'd closed the hood, taken the baby and gone back inside. A nap had followed as a natural consequence of sleepless nights and when Bo had woken up he'd been hungry enough to start cooking, leaving Luke to take care of everything baby-related. Not that it mattered, they'd both been turned into a pair of housewives over the course of two short weeks.

_**Now, I don't know about you, but I just can't make up my mind which of them boys would look sillier in a dress.**_

Bo told himself that it didn't matter. That it was just one chase in a county that was doomed to have hundreds more, and that he'd played his part by calling the Sweetwater police when it became clear that Cletus was leading the pack in that direction. Disguised his voice to avoid questions, and even in coming to the rescue of his family he'd played the part of a woman. But it wasn't important, it was just one day.

Which would have been fine, except that he figured it'd be eighteen years of days like this (more like twenty-one because Dukes were known to take their time in coming to maturity) before he and Luke could be back to their normal selves again. And he wasn't sure he could wait that long.


	6. Week Four: Running on Two Cylinders

**Week Four: Running on Two Cylinders  
**

_May 23-29, 1982_

It wasn't a plan. If it had been a plan, it would have had a better chance of working. He would have considered contingencies, built in structure, had backups at the ready. But it wasn't a plan, it was more of a need. Two missed Sundays at church, and he might have figured it didn't do his soul any harm. He'd missed plenty of services back in the days when he was a weary, short-haired Marine in the service of his country, so it wasn't like a couple more would matter.

The rest of his family wasn't about to win any perfect attendance awards either, though they didn't have as many gaps as he did. Still, they were fully adult and capable of making their own mistakes as far as the Lord was concerned. The littlest Duke, though, was still an innocent and Luke figured that the sooner he got into the habit of going to church each Sunday, the less likely he'd be to do too much carousing through Saturday nights when he got older. With any luck, and a lot of church-going, this Duke boy wouldn't find himself in the same mess as Bo and Luke were in right now.

"He may be a bit young," Jesse counseled at the breakfast table when Luke brought up his not-quite-plan to attend church.

"I don't remember you and Lavinia missing too many services when you first had me and Bo here." Luke, of course, had already been old enough to get tucked away into church school with some of the other toddlers and Miss Kimberly, who had taught them about all the animals getting onto the ark, two by two. As far back as Luke could remember, that was the only lesson they learned up until he was old enough to sit in the pew with his guardians. The animals got on the ark, two by two. "You took Bo into the service with you." He sopped up his egg yolk with toast. He wasn't much of one for runny eggs, but Daisy made them that way most mornings all the same.

Jesse's noncommittal nod about his churchgoing history got interrupted by Bo's outburst.

"Yeah, but I wasn't like him," using his fork to point in the general direction of the baby in his bassinet, who was, for once, sleeping peacefully. Just yesterday, Jesse had started giving him a bit of scrambled egg at dinner, saying he'd done it for Bo when he was that age and it'd helped him sleep better. "I didn't scream and cry all the time."

"Oh, please," Luke mumbled, which raised a giggle from Daisy. The scrambled eggs hadn't worked any miracles on this baby, and as far as Luke could remember they hadn't done much for Bo, either.

"Now, that ain't necessarily so, Bo. You could be noisy," their uncle reported in between sips of his coffee.

"Could be? Heck, I don't reckon none of us slept a wink until he was two. And by then he was running all around the place making a mess of everything." Luke had been in school by then, and he'd had to take more than one homework handout back to his teacher with a band of tape running up the middle and ridiculous-sounding excuses about a younger cousin that didn't know any better.

"You was a handful," Jesse agreed when Bo started to lodge a protest about the way his character was being defamed. Daisy laughed some more and passed Bo the last of the hash brown potatoes to bribe him out of his frown. She hadn't lived here yet when Bo was that small; by the time she'd joined the rest of them, the youngest Duke cousin was almost five and could manage to keep himself quiet for short periods of time. "But you liked to sleep, too." Some things never changed. "That little one there, he don't sleep half as much as you used to."

"He ain't slept all last night," had been Luke's logic. "He'll sleep for a while yet and if he wakes up in church, I'll keep him quiet."

_**Now friends, old Luke there is running on about two cylinders. I reckon his brain's gone on vacation, and about half his patience, too. If that baby starts to cry in church, I wouldn't be surprised to find Luke crying right along with him.**_

Jesse offered up the same shrug he always had when it came to stubborn fools, Bo sighed because he knew there'd be no escape from church this week and Daisy had started in on him about which outfit the baby should be dressed in for his first visit to church. Luke didn't figure it much mattered as long as his diaper was clean. Most of what he wore were hand-me-down, faded one-piece things that snapped down one side or at the shoulders. Bo had worn them, and Luke before him, and some of them were old enough that Jesse said their fathers might have used them, too. There were the newer things that Daisy had bought him, but Luke didn't see any point in putting a kid who dribbled slobber on himself into anything fine or dressy. That logic, his girl cousin informed him, was unacceptable.

Which meant waking the kid up to dress him and maybe that part was inevitable anyway. Daisy took him into her room with her to do the honors, leaving Luke and Bo to go back to their own room to get ready. Luke gave his unmade bed a longing look, then caught Bo doing the same. But they were good boys, raised on church and doing right, so they took their time getting into their Sunday best and ignored the cries coming from Daisy's room.

It wasn't a plan or he would have done a better job of working out the cars; who would be driving which and in what order. As it was, they all tried to get into the pickup as usual and found that while four was tight, five was impossible. Dixie got ruled out because mussed hair wouldn't do in church, so Bo ended up in the General while everyone else rode in the pickup. Baby Bo got over the upset of being gussied up (in a one-piece thing that Luke didn't figure was any nicer than any of the others, really) once they got rolling, just as his daddy used to do when he was a kid who preferred to stay dirty. (And just wait until this version of Bo discovered girls and everything changed. The boy and his father would be duking it out for rights to the bathroom mirror.)

It wasn't a plan or he might have picked a different pew than their usual – somewhere close to the door rather than out in the middle – and he definitely would have considered seating arrangements more carefully. Instead, the family settled into their regular configuration with Jesse on the aisle, then Daisy, then Bo (who used to be a flight risk) then Luke. The baby, in the car seat that had been left with him that first day, and which he would probably outgrow within a few more weeks if he kept eating like big Bo, got placed in what had once been Aunt Lavinia's spot. Cooter showed up late as usual, and ended up in his customary spot in the back corner. Took Luke a while to realize how much he was going to envy his friend's prime location.

It wasn't a plan or he would have started finding his way out of the pew the minute the little one woke up with a fussy whine that should make his father proud. Instead he tried shushing him, the same way Lavinia had shushed the children in her care years ago. Worked about as well today as it had back then, which was to say, not at all. Picking the kid up out of the car seat didn't make him any quieter, and the heads started turning around just about the time that he began the gentle bouncing motion that never did do any good. (But he always tried it anyway because it just plain seemed like it should work.)

It wasn't a plan or he would have made sure that all the sensitive toes in their thin dress shoes were out of his way before he started to shuffle down toward the end of the pew and the aisle that lay beyond it. He would have thought ahead about stealth and silence, not cracking any twigs so the revenuers or the Viet Cong couldn't find him. But he was easily spotted in his blue suit that contrasted so nicely with the white walls, not to mention the little squeal Daisy let out when his full weight settled briefly on her bare toe.

From there he didn't need a plan, it was all improvisation and adrenalin. Preacher Jackson was losing the congregation to the distraction, which left him glaring hellfire and brimstone down on Luke. Bo was useless, looking away from the whole fiasco as if he could separate himself from his obvious association with the rest of the clan. Jesse looked about as happy as the preacher and Daisy was biting her lip and trying to figure out how to maintain her ladylike posture and rub her toe all at once. Luke shoved his way past Jesse's knees and ran for it. Caught Cooter's wide eyes just as he sprinted the last few steps down the aisle and out the door.

For not being a plan, it really wasn't too terrible after that. The clean diapers in the pickup weren't needed, and neither was the bottle of formula that Luke offered up. It was just that the kid was a Duke and didn't want to be cooped up on a clear, sweet-smelling, May morning when he could be outside, doing better things than listening to a sermon about reconciliation. Luke walked with him around the manmade lake next to the library, pointing out some ducks and a toad that were beyond the little one's field of vision, anyway. Promised the kid to take him fishing someday, and for now that was okay.

There might be no saving this one, just like there had been no saving him and Bo. After all, within a minute of the bells ringing noon, the church doors flew open to a line of young ladies, the hems of their pastel dresses swishing as they rushed to beat each other across the street to the lake's edge and Luke. Cooing and squealing their glee, and Bo glowered greenly from up on the church steps. But there was no point in jealousy; it wasn't Luke's blue eyes they were going ga-ga over, it was the kid's. And it'd be sixteen years or so before that one was old enough to start dating.

Maybe thirteen. The boy was a Duke, after all.

* * *

"Y'all get him every other day of the week," Daisy had argued, as if the noisemaker that had been permanently installed into their bedroom was a toy. A fabulous plaything, like that shiny train that used to sit in the display window in Dobson's Department Store up in Capital City when they were kids. All three of them had loved that thing, the loop of a track it went around – a little town at one end with the train station, and the mountains at the other end. Fields of white, powdery snow in between and Bo had been sure Santa would bring it to him the Christmas that he was eight, but mostly he'd gotten sweaters and new boots. Lavinia said Santa knew he was growing like a weed and figured it was more important to keep him in warm clothes that would protect him against early morning chores than to bring him a toy train. He'd cried about it for a couple of days until Luke got sick of it and told him to knock it off. So he'd quieted, but he'd never forgiven Santa for what had not been under the tree that year.

And Daisy was acting like the baby was just that special a gift, dropped off at their house by someone as mythical as Santa Claus, and she wasn't getting her fair share of playtime.

"Monday's my day off from work," was her logic and it was hard to argue when she was the only one of them who punched a clock. "I ought to be able to do what I want with the day, and I want to spend it with Little Bloke." She'd chosen to use that name for him, too.

Jesse didn't see any harm in it, and even Saint Luke seemed ready to let go of his saintly duties for the day, so it was settled. Morning chores were done, breakfast was eaten and the dishes scrubbed within an inch of their lives. After weeks of confinement, the Duke boys were free.

"C'mon, Luke," Bo called, already halfway across the kitchen, just six steps away from the door and the fresh air on the other side. Another twelve steps (if he hopped all the porch stairs at once) would get him to the General's window and the keys were still in the ignition from yesterday's drive to the church. In half a minute, tops, they'd be cruising down Old Mill Road en route to the grapevine or the mud flats or Timbertop Ridge with its leapfrogging hills. If, that was, Luke would get up off the couch and shake a leg.

Or just stop staring at him as though he less than sane.

"What?" Bo asked, running his hands through his hair in case there was something awful caught in there. He didn't see how there could be, since he hadn't spent any time in close contact with Luke's messy son since this morning's shower, but you never could tell. Just last week Luke had made it all the way into the bank in town with the stained and pungent burping cloth still resting on his shoulder.

"Where are you going?" Luke's question, and he still hadn't stopped that strange staring or moved an inch from his slouched position.

Bo came back into the archway between the kitchen and the living room to get a closer look at his cousin. Now they were staring at each other like a dumbstruck pair of idiots.

"Out," he figured was self-explanatory. "For a drive. Come on."

Luke shrugged back at him. "Nah, not now. I'm tired."

_**This is getting downright serious. When a Duke says he's too tired to go for a drive, I reckon it's time to look up and make sure the sky is still blue.**_

Tired? Shoot tired didn't begin to describe it. Bo was exhausted, like he'd been harvesting for six months without respite. But there was a road out there that was just begging for two Duke boys to race down it. Or—"We could go fishing, if you want." Because there was that, too. Fish in the pond with their mouths unsullied by dug up worms and J-hooks, just waiting to be caught and turned into supper. No amount of tired had ever kept Luke from—

"No thanks." _No thanks?_ What kind of stupid, polite answer was that? Luke should give him a straight out no or—no, that was stupid, Luke should have been halfway to the barn by now to fetch the poles and telling Bo not to forget the tackle box because he was an obnoxious nag. "I reckon maybe I'll take a nap."

"A nap?"

_**Yep, still blue up there. I was halfway expecting it to be pink.**_

Jesse was sitting back comfortably in the red chair, offering one of those vague and indulgent smiles, half-hidden by beard, when he really should have been feeling Luke's forehead for fever. Or maybe taking him straight to the hospital, because Luke Duke did not take naps.

"Yeah," Luke said, stretching and studying the couch around him. Must have decided it was too short or too lumpy because he stood up, tucked the tail of his shirt, and looked toward their bedroom. "I'm _tired_," he repeated, like Bo was either slow or deaf.

"Hel—Heck," he corrected himself, because there was a child present. Mostly, Daisy had absconded to her room with him, but the door was open and cooing noises were coming out which meant that his voice had to be carrying inside. And cussing in front of kids, even the little cusses that didn't count for much, was a bad idea. (Never mind that he'd said some really unpleasant words the first time burping the baby went badly, all over his back.) "I'm tired too, but that ain't no reason to sleep."

Luke snorted and waved a hand in the air at him, as though that was too ridiculous a thought to deserve a response. Meanwhile, Jesse's smile turned into a quiet, knowing chuckle. Another chance to laugh at the whippersnappers who thought they knew what tired was, but they had no idea.

"Luke," he complained, letting the vowel in the middle drag out in that way his cousin had hated from the time they were little. "We ain't done nothing together for weeks. I'm tired too, but we don't never get no time to do nothing anymore."

"Bo." He wondered, just for a brief moment before things got loud, when it was that he'd become Luke's wife. _You don't spend time with me anymore, don't you still love me?_ "You ain't got the first idea about what tired even is. Half the time you just roll right over and go back to sleep when _your son_ cries." Or when Luke became his wife, because that sounded exactly like every scolding wife Bo had ever heard.

"I'm awake every bit as much as you are, and I swear, Luke, half the time you when get me up after you've changed him and tell me he's hungry, you're making it up. He don't know he's hungry until I stick a bottle in his mouth."

"If he eats, he's hungry," Luke insisted, and it was turning into one of those real beautiful fights, the kind that had them standing chest to chest and complaining right into each other's faces while their hands curled into fists at their sides.

"He might be hungry, but he might not and there ain't no way you can tell. You just want to get me out into the kitchen with him so you can catch a couple of minutes of sleep when I ain't looking." It always gave Bo just a little extra satisfaction that when they got close, Luke had to tip his head back and look up at him to maintain eye contact.

The sound out of Luke's mouth was somewhere between a hiss and a snort, a _pfft_ of dismissal. "Half the time I got to come out here with you just to make sure you don't fall asleep and set the house on fire. Ain't no way you're as tired as me, when I have to just about drag you out of bed to do chores, a good half hour after I've already been up and changed—"

"Oh no, Luke Duke, you ain't saying that you get less sleep than me, not when I—"

There was a hand shoving at his chest, making him halfway tempted to slap it away before he realized it wasn't very strong but it was plenty skinny, and it was warm and sweet, which meant it couldn't have been Luke's.

Daisy. Trying to push her way between them, saying something about how the noise of their fighting was upsetting their son – their son, his and Luke's and if that were even possible he'd make the argument that there was no way he was the mother—

And it all got drowned out by Jesse.

"All of you, just hush!" Bo and Luke and Daisy were smart and experienced enough to know that disobedience of an order made in that tone of voice would be the equivalent of begging for punishment. They all quieted, more or less immediately. (Bo's mouth might just have been the last one to snap shut.) The baby wailed from Daisy's room, because he didn't yet know about whippings. A sudden urge rose up in Bo to make sure that the little one never had to learn about them, either. Later, when he was at a real risk for getting one, but at the moment the only threat was to the grown-up Dukes and Bo had better keep his mind on the here and now. "Now, Daisy," Jesse was close, when did he even stand up, much less waddle over here, pink in the face and huffing like a steam train? "You go on back in there and tend to Little Bloke. Go on," he had to add when her hands landed on her hips in protest of the fact that she had plenty more to say to her shameful, baby-scaring cousins. Her lips leveled out into a flat line and she stared at one of them then the other with her eyebrows low before she turned on her bare heel and stormed hard across the living room floor to her room.

Surely the slam of her door didn't scare the kid; only Bo and Luke's little family discussion in the next room was capable of doing that.

"Oh, real nice, Luke—" he started back in, with intent to point out that it was, all of it, Luke's fault.

"Bo!" But there wasn't going to be any of that, not in Uncle Jesse's house. (And the old man's shout probably didn't scare the baby, either.) "Just – cool off, go out for that drive."

"Yes, sir." Seemed a strange order to get, and an even stranger order to want to disobey. He took a deep breath in, let it out with a huff. Watched a little smirk start to curl onto Luke's lip and leaned forward instead of back, went toward the argument rather than away.

"Go," Jesse asserted, pointing toward the door. "And Luke, you get on out of the house, too."

His cousin did not whine. Never had, just ask him and he'd swear to it as fact. So that sound in his throat must have been more of a growl, and that look he doled out must have been resignation instead of just plain meanness about the nap he wasn't going to get.

"You boys go off in different directions and I don't want to see you none until you both simmer down."

They were big boys now, their feet clomped heavily on the floor as they made their way to the door. Like a herd of cattle, as Lavinia used to say, and it was almost loud enough to drown out Luke's mumbles about _great job, Bo_.

"Get, I said." Jesse, right on their tails, making sure that the door didn't smack them on the backside on their way out. And, as a side benefit, watching that they didn't start up all over again in the farmyard.

Luke huffed and thudded down the porch stairs. Gave Bo or Jesse or the house itself one last dirty look, tucked his shirttail again, then turned sharply to head toward the back of the house and the fields beyond. Saint Luke, off to be a good little farm boy and tend to the crops, or make a good show of it, anyway.

Bo kicked at rocks on his way to the General. It wasn't his fault that a chicken took squawking, feather flying offense. He raised a hand in silent apology to Jesse anyway, and climbed into the window. The General's wheels sent more rocks flying than Bo's feet ever could as he roared out onto the dirt lane that would lead him to Old Mill Road.

The car's growl was just as angry as Bo was. Resenting how it'd been left mostly idle for weeks over a baby it didn't have anything to do with. Unless it did. Bo counted back again as he had a dozen times before, just to be sure. Last spring, early summer, who had he been with? Assuming the kid had spent a full nine months in his mama's belly, there were only two possibilities. One of them had come to church each week since then, her blonde hair braided back like an innocent little girl's, her face scrubbed of makeup. She wasn't as innocent as her father thought she was, but her belly had never swelled, and she hadn't been sent off to an aunt in Alabama like so many other girls before her. Couldn't have been Katherine Foster.

The other… the other one, the General had been his co-conspirator in the conquest. She was from Sweetwater or Choctaw – her story was as slippery as the sweat on the back of her neck – and she was at the Boar's Nest in a tangle of other girls from out of town. She'd said her name was Mary, but that was a bit too conveniently common. Especially when he'd heard another girl call her Sadie. She was a black-haired Irish girl, the kind that was rare in Hazzard, her skin a fine pattern of freckles and her eyes somewhere between green and grey. She'd been tall enough to meet his eyes without having to tip her head back terribly far, and brazen enough to make perfectly clear what she'd wanted.

_I heard you have a fast car_, she'd said. _I like fast cars_.

He hadn't worried about how the General's (or his) reputation had made it to Sweetwater or Choctaw or just maybe it was Chickasaw the third time he asked. He hadn't been like Luke, suspicious and cynical. He'd known a gift horse when he saw one, and he'd not so much looked it in the mouth as taken it for a drive straight to Hazzard Pond, where she'd learned that the General wasn't the only one in the family who could move quickly. She hadn't complained any, had given him a messy kiss in front of her friends when they'd gotten back to the Boar's Nest afterward, then the girls had all piled into a couple of cars and been gone.

Seemed like Miss Mary-Sadie had gotten what she'd come for. And maybe something else besides; he couldn't be sure. Wouldn't know until the baby back at the house grew some hair, or his eyes settled into a different color, or his skin showed an easy tan like Luke's or a red hot burn like an Irish girl's would.

In the meantime, he felt perfectly justified in being upset with Luke, who should be in the passenger seat right now, giving him useless instructions on roads he already knew – turn left here and avoid that speed trap over there. Since his cousin had seen fit to fight him and otherwise just be a surly cuss that wasn't currently at his side, he decided to ignore the advice he wasn't getting and go right past Cletus' favorite hiding place about three miles an hour over the limit. He smiled when Cletus fell in behind him, laughed outright when the air around him got thick with the dust of the chase. Bantered back and forth with the deputy over the C.B. and eventually left him, wet but otherwise healthy, standing on his sinking cruiser in the shallows of Hound Dog Lake.

And none of it was any fun, not really, without the raw sarcasm and head-tipped, timber rattling laugh coming from the seat next to him.

_**Them boys is a mess. I ain't exactly sure how they're going to fix it, neither.**_

* * *

There was a tree amongst trees, the old oak about a third of the way from the north end of the field, with branches spread wide and covered in thick leaves. Luke could sleep under that tree, had done it before and it was about as familiar as his own bed. Jesse used to send a younger version of him there in the middle of a long day in the fields and tell him to get a nap before coming back to work. Bo slept there, too, as a baby and child, and Daisy must have when she came along later – Luke didn't remember that as well. Had clearer memories of having to sling a heavy arm over Bo's small body to keep him still long enough that he'd sleep. So Luke could sleep, so they'd both be helpful again in the late afternoon.

He'd been taking care of babies all his life, really. Always had to be careful with Bo because he was smaller and slower and would follow anywhere Luke led, even if it took longer legs and cooler heads to get there safely. Luke had to look after him, had to tell him to keep up or stay behind, had to get whined and hollered at about how it's wasn't fair that Bo was younger.

Bo's legs had grown, but his temperament hadn't and he might just as well still have been a six-year-old brat, sniffling and snuffling against his shirt sleeve and complaining that Luke never wanted to play with him anymore. It was enough to have to look after Bo, now raising his cousin's son as well—

His mind had been over these sour thoughts a hundred times already over the course of the month, and they never did him any good. Trying to sleep now would just be giving his brain permission to keep right on being resentful so he turned towards the fields and started checking on the corn that didn't need checking.

Sacrifice, well, he understood it. Knew what he'd given up when he let himself be drafted into the Marines without a fight, knew why he'd done it, too. Knew, as well, what the whole family gave up a few years later to keep him and Bo out of prison. Some days, especially the ones where sleep was scarce and he was pretty sure he couldn't stand to hear even one more piercing cry that meant another disgusting diaper to change, he figured he'd give just about anything he had just to do one more moonshine run. The dark, the speed, the air electric with the hunt; who needed sleep when they had more adrenalin in their systems than a rabbit on the run?

Farming was the compromise, after that night the two of them couldn't outrun the hounds. And raising a baby was the compromise after one of them – and his money was still on Bo, but he couldn't rule himself out – went out and got some girl pregnant.

He lowered his shoulders, twisted the kinks out of his neck that came from holding a baby or lying on his side all night rocking the cradle just slightly so the sniffles and cries would settle into deep and even breathing. Walked down the line of corn and smelled the green of growing things, the sweet brown of turned earth. Tried not to resent what his life had become.

Jesse and Lavinia had never had days like this, hadn't needed to be separated and sent off to their own miserable corners. They'd just found ways to love the children that'd dropped into their lives. Luke figured if there was any chance of him being even a halfway good parent to the poor little baby back at the house, he needed to get over his petty resentments. So he straightened his spine as he walked the rows of corn, breathed in every bit of fresh air he could and resolved to give up anything he had to in order to give poor the little guy a good childhood. Even if it meant he found a way to be pleasant to Bo, even when his patience was stretched thinner than the hair on top of Boss Hogg's head.


	7. Week Five: Milestones

**Week Five: Milestones  
**

_May 30 – June 5, 1982_

_**Well, now, if this ain't the perfect picture of unexpected domesticity. Two Duke boys up before first light, huddled together under the bare, overhead bulb of their own kitchen, with a blanket-wrapped baby between them. Now that's a sight I figure half the county never reckoned on seeing, and here we are with a front-row view. Look at those tiny blue eyes, staring up into Bo's face around the edges of a bottle, one little hand wrapped around Luke's pinky. And more than that, look at how them two big boys are relaxed, peaceful, almost happy for the first time in a month.**_

"Hey, Luke, hand me the—"

It had taken him the better part of a week to figure it out. That it wasn't the baby in his arms that had come between him and Luke any more than it had been Diane Benson or the Carnival of Thrills that came between them almost two years before. They'd come between themselves, bickering and fighting over a change in their lives that hadn't left either of them happy.

"Here." A towel got draped over his shoulder so he could turn Little Bloke around and pat him on the back. It wasn't any more fun closing his eyes and praying for a burp (instead of something worse) than it had been last week, but it was nice that Luke could read his mind and give him what he wanted before he even had to get all the words out. Even if his cousin was otherwise just sitting next to him at the kitchen table, watching Bo try to remember everything Jesse'd tried to teach him about taking care of babies.

Luke was hardwired to look out for kin, even if he didn't quite know how he was related to them, and even if he didn't much want to do it. Bo's own childhood spoke to that, from the sheer number of times he'd been picked up and dusted off, then told not to follow if he couldn't keep up. Luke didn't want Bo along on half his childhood adventures, but more than that he didn't want him hurt or lost, so he'd scold, but then the walking pace would slow. Luke would see to it that nothing happened to him, other than minor bumps or scrapes.

And that was after Bo could walk. There was no telling what happened before he had memories.

But doing didn't mean enjoying, and that was where the saintliness came in. Luke could scowl and complain his way through years of unpleasant tasks if he really believed they were the right thing to do. Bo didn't understand it, not really, but he'd been around it long enough to know. His cousin was dedicated to raising this little Duke and he'd give up everything fun in his life to do it, if that was what the situation called for.

And Jesse was bound in duty to keep his small family together. Even if that meant separating him and Luke when the two of them were stupid-tired, beyond the point of reason and fighting over going for a drive, of all things. When they needed to be sent to their corners like naughty children in need of a nap, because that was exactly what they had been. Then, just as he'd done when everyone was small enough to get whipped, their uncle had pulled them all back together again and reminded them that they shared a single task — to keep the family, from its white-haired patriarch to this bald little noisemaker, intact. Hugs and forgiveness and promises to try to get more sleep had followed, and all of that led to this pre-dawn huddle at the kitchen table.

And just listen there, a hearty burp right in his ear. They were going to have to teach this kid some manners.

Luke smirked at the way Bo shifted the weight of the baby in his arms to tentatively run his fingers through the tangled hair at the nape of his own neck.

"You're clean," his cousin assured him. Which was good to hear, because sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between a burp gone right and a burp gone wrong. And then sometimes the baby spit up for no reason at all. "You ready to give the diaper changing a go?"

No, he most certainly was not.

But he'd asked for this, in almost as many words. _ I want to be equal partners in taking care of Little Bloke_, he'd said, forcing himself to use Rosco's accidentally neutral misnomer for the boy and thinking that someday they were going to have to give the kid a real name. (But that had always been tacitly planned for when they figured out who the mother was, for after the arrangements had been made and the belated marriage conducted. Then they could baptize and christen the boy with a real and proper name. In the meantime, Little Bloke wasn't so terrible.) _I want us to do this together, _he'd added.

Because he knew what missing someone was like. It was a hole that nothing could fill, one of those behind-the-eyes headaches that you figured you could ignore, but it was always there, hurting. He'd had a lifetime of missing his mother and father, even if he never properly knew them, and fifteen years of missing his aunt once she was gone. Then there were those years of missing Luke while he was in basic training and away at war in the Marines. He missed Luke every time he went off for a weekend reunion with his old buddies from the service, too, and as mad as they'd both been, Bo had fiercely missed his cousin in those few days of being with Diane and her carnival.

"I guess," Bo agreed, because he knew Luke was going easy on him. Bloke was quiet enough, even halfway content, so odds were there was nothing in the diaper to worry about.

The chair scraped roughly across the floor when he stood, threatened to turn over completely, but Luke was there to catch it. Bo offered up a grateful nod. It was late enough that their kin wouldn't be justified in being upset to be awakened by the clatter, but Bo would be just as happy if they slept for awhile longer anyway. It was bad enough having one witness to what he figured was about to be a disaster. He didn't need three.

But he did need that one, or want him. It wasn't that he figured changing a diaper ought to be all that hard – mostly it was just gross – but he'd already spent enough time alone lately. He wanted Luke at his side.

Because missing Luke when there was real distance between them was one thing, and if it wasn't fun, it at least made sense. Missing Luke when they'd spent the last month in the same house – in the same bedroom a lot of the time – was just stupid. If one of them was going to raise this kid, they both were.

_**Well, now, that just goes to show you. There ain't nothing that can come between them Duke boys for long. Oh, one's as stubborn as the other, but when it comes right down to it, whatever they're going through, they're going to want the other one by their side.**_

"Not," Luke said, with greater alarm than Bo would have figured was necessary, "in the kitchen!" Because Bo had been about to lay Bloke on the table, and ask Luke to get him a diaper from the pile in the bedroom or pick one off the clothes-drying rack just outside the door on the porch.

"How come?" he asked.

Luke just snorted and smirked and pointed off toward the bedroom instead.

* * *

Letting Bo figure things out on his own was half the fun. Usually, anyway, but sometimes he had to stop the mess before it became a full out disaster.

"Keep one hand on him." Like now, in the middle of a diaper change, when Bo was reaching for a clean diaper and figuring that the baby would stay put on the little ironing-board-turned-changing-table, just as neatly as the plastic dolls that Daisy used to put on it years ago when it was in her bedroom instead of theirs.

"He ain't going nowhere," Bo groused back at him, but a grudging hand came up and planted itself over the baby's belly, like an owl descending over a tiny field mouse. Hard to believe, sometimes, that Bo had ever been as small as the child he was caring for now. His temperament never changed, though, even if he got a lot bigger. "And the dang—"

_**Look out, Bo! I've seen this before and it don't end pretty.**_

Whatever it was that Bo intended to say got lost in a holler of complaint when the baby decided that now would be a good time to empty his bladder.

Luke had enough experience to have kept a good distance throughout the process, but Bo had neither the practice nor the luxury of doing anything but staying where he was, keeping his tiny charge safe from falling off the changing table.

It was Luke's resounding laugh that must've brought a newly awakened Jesse to their door.

"It ain't funny, Luke," Bo complained.

"Help him," Jesse said and it was supposed to sound like a scold, Luke was pretty sure, but there was a smile hiding in the white of the old man's beard.

_**Poor Bo had to finish changing that diaper – with Luke's help, of course – before he could go off and get himself a shower. And Luke halfway figured his cousin would give up trying to do his share of the daddy-duty, but he didn't. He was a mite more careful about diaper-changing time, though, and he let out a few cross words, too. Mumblings about tanned hides when we know Bo would never do that, but that little critter must've understood, because he behaved his tiny self and there weren't any more mishaps over the next few days.**_

Maybe, Luke figured, the little one was finally settling in. Maybe he'd been as sick as any of them of the Duke boys bickering and being at odds. Maybe he'd stopped missing his mama so much, but whatever it was, the little guy wasn't nearly as prone to hollering fits, and he was easier to soothe when one did come along.

Which was how it came to be that near the end of the week, Bo was sitting next to him on his bed at about three in the morning as Luke gave the baby his bottle. It was quiet and warm, it was an exhausted but not altogether unpleasant experience.

"You eat just like your daddy," Luke said in that sing-song voice he always used when talking to the baby. Which he'd taken to doing a lot, since it seemed to keep him calm and focused. He never said much, just explained the finer details of milking a cow or scattering chicken feed, whatever he was doing at the time. The baby never answered him back, but this time Bo did.

"He ain't mine," Bo informed him. "He's yours. But if Bloke there was mine," the careful use of that silly name that was somewhere between _Bo_ and _Luke_ did not go unnoticed. "He'd grow up to be the best looking man in all of Hazzard." So much pride in the assertion.

"Oh yeah? Best looking?"

"You bet," his cousin vowed.

"Where would that leave you?" Because Bo was never content to be second prettiest to anyone, ever. Not even Daisy.

"I'd be the other best looking man in Hazzard," was the hesitant explanation, followed by a yawn. "No," came the correction. "I'd be the best looking and he'd be second, by a hair." Bo's finger stroked against the baby's cheek, and the kid's eyes rolled up to get a good look at him. "If he was mine. But he ain't. He's yours," didn't sound all that convinced, didn't sound like he wanted to be all that convinced, either.

Luke laughed, quietly enough that there would be no unhappy kin showing up at their bedroom door.

And he figured that, if he couldn't sleep, his second best option would be running moonshine, but a close third would be doing exactly what he was doing. Sitting shoulder to shoulder with Bo in a pointless debate about who was the fairest in all the land, while a contented baby snuggled in his arms.

* * *

"I reckon he's been busy at the garage," Luke was saying. Talking to Jesse and it was a relatively idle conversation for a Saturday afternoon. Used to be that almost all their Saturday conversations took place over the CB, to the background music of a screaming siren and squealing tires, sometimes punctuated by gunfire. Lots of hollering, orders given and plans made and somehow everything would get back to being peaceful by sundown. "Or something."

But instead of skimming along at speeds in the triple digits, spewing out dust behind them, he and Luke were both sitting on the floor of their own living room. A blanket spread out but it wasn't their other Saturday afternoon activity, a picnic with girls. It was the two of them sitting cross-legged, taking turns dangling shiny, noisy objects in front of a prone baby's rapt face.

"Well, maybe," Jesse agreed from his comfortable seat in the armchair. "But it ain't like him to stay away so long."

_**I don't know. Cooter's grown up a bunch over the past few years, but I reckon seeing his wild friends get all domesticated like this might just scare the poor man out of his pants.**_

As if in some great cosmic mockery, it was the keys to the General Lee, ignition and trunk on one ring, that enamored the little guy. (The kid couldn't do much else yet, but he could smile prettier than a rainbow. Maybe he was Bo's after all. Luke hardly ever smiled and even when he did there was usually a sardonic twist to it.) Bo took the keys from Luke's fingers, since his cousin was so busy talking to their uncle and not paying much attention to jingling, and dangled them over that little face. Told himself that it was only because after a month of mostly hearing the baby scream, his nerves were shot and he'd do anything to maintain the relative good cheer.

"It ain't him that's been gone, it's me and Bo."

He looked up from his dangling duties at the mention of his name, but they weren't talking to him, they were just talking around him, the same as they ever had. Leaving him to play while they talked their grown-up talk, but this wasn't any kind of important conversation.

"Eh," Bloke said and it was far more interesting than anything Luke and Jesse were discussing.

"Maybe so, maybe you been busy. But it ain't like Cooter," their uncle asserted, "not to stop by and make sure we's all all right."

Bo started wiggling the keys a little more vigorously. The baby was enjoying it, he was enjoying it, but apparently Luke was not getting quite so much pleasure out of the noise. A wide hand came into Bo's view, clamping right around the metal of the keys to dampen the sound, then pulling them away from him.

"He still sees Daisy. I'm sure she's told him we're all just fine."

Bloke wasn't too thrilled about this situation where the keys were missing and Bo considered snatching them back, but that little face was already scrunching up, his _eh_ sounds turning to something a lot more like _eeeeeeh_, which was just bad direction for things to go.

"You know what I think," Jesse chimed in. "I think maybe we ought to go and see him instead of waiting for him to come see us."

Bo had to wonder at it, how natural scooping up a baby had become. He hardly even noticed anymore the size disparity between him and what he was lifting. He didn't think about where to put his hands or how to hold on anymore, either. Babies were sturdier than they looked, or at least this one was. Had to be, if neither Duke boy had broken him yet.

"For all we know, he's in some kind of trouble and needs help."

Luke was shaking his head, sparing one quick glance at what Bo and Bloke were up to, since the little one was getting more vocal. Must have decided there was nothing interesting going on there, because he turned back to his conversation with Jesse.

"Nah, if he needed something, he'd tell Daisy."

Daisy. She used to play with dolls on this same floor, on a blanket a lot like this one. (Except he didn't remember it covering quite so much of the hardwood. Hard to remember what it was like to be so much closer to the ground.) Used to hold them upright, just like Bo was, and pretend to make them walk. Then again, girls' dolls never did what Bloke had figured out to do.

"Luke," Bo said.

"I ain't so sure of that," Jesse countered. "That fool can be mite proud." Yeah, well. Just look who was talking.

"Luke," Bo tried again, got just as ignored as he was the first time.

"Look, it ain't that I'm opposed to visiting Cooter, but I reckon he's just fine." Of course he was. Rosco and Boss weren't precisely community-minded folk, but they'd've come out to the Duke farm and let the family all know if something happened to any of their friends. And yet Luke and Jesse went on with their pointless conversation, ignoring Bo. Meanwhile, Bloke was starting to get fussy again.

"All the same," Jesse was saying, fingers combing through the whiteness of his beard. "It don't seem like Cooter to spend this much time away from us."

"Luke," Bo snapped, tired of being pushed to the edges of his kin's conversation. He wasn't a little boy anymore.

"Bo," Jesse grumbled back, probably getting ready to remind him about the appropriate use of the words _excuse me_. It wouldn't have mattered one bit if he'd said them in all politeness; his kin was set on ignoring him.

"I'm sorry, Uncle Jesse," but he wasn't really. At least he had their attention. "I reckon Cooter don't come around none because he ain't one for screaming babies." And that closed out the existing conversation, making room for the important part. "But look here!" He held Bloke upright a little more, made sure his feet were touching the blanket with the firmness of the floor under it.

Luke finally turned to look, shrugged his shoulders and opened his mouth like he was going to reengage himself in a dissertation about the finer points of Cooter's recent behavior.

"Look, Luke," he insisted. "He'd trying to stand."

That was the important thing, what Little Bloke had been doing all along. Pressing his feet against the ground like he understood that standing was important. Like he was going to skip crawling and go right to walking.

"He ain't trying to stand," Luke said with a small laugh in his voice and a dismissive shake of his head.

"He is so," Bo insisted. "Look at his feet. Or you hold him, and feel it." But Bloke had about had it, and the relatively peaceful afternoon was shattered by a complaining cry. Luke put his hands out like he meant to take the baby from Bo after all, but Bo refused to give him up, cradling him close again.

"Well, now, he's a little young for it, but I reckon Bo's right," Jesse put in. "Now, don't get too excited, Bo," followed when he started to smirk at Luke in victory. "He's only three months old. It ain't standing he's doing, it's instinct. You done it too when you was tiny, but you didn't get properly on your feet until you was nine months old. Then you took your first steps maybe six weeks later."

Luke frowned about something. Maybe it that Bo must have been pretty precocious to have walked before he was a year old. Or just maybe it was that Luke didn't come to live on the farm until he was almost four and by then there was no one left alive who had seen his first steps or could even say how old he was when he'd taken them.

"But babies, they do get the instinct to press their feet against a firm surface when they're little. Just usually they're older than that little feller there."

"See there, Little Bloke?" Bo told the infant, whose face was red and scrunchy and mean, but Bo didn't care. "You're a fast learner. You'll be driving a car in no time."

_**Look out, Boss Hogg. Shoot, look out anyone that's going to be driving through Hazzard any time in the next fifteen years or so. Looks like Bo's gonna have that baby behind the wheel of the General Lee real soon. If the kid can take his fingers out of his mouth long enough to grab onto the steering wheel, that is.**_

Luke's lips pressed against each other, like Bo was being such a fool. (Funny, moments like that were when Luke and Little Bloke resembled each other most. Luke's fits may have been silent, but they were every bit as grouchy as the baby's.) "He ain't nowheres near driving."

Then again, maybe it'd be for the best if this baby was Bo's. Then he'd know enough to ignore the naysaying all around him, put the pedal down to the floor and show everyone what he could do.

"Potty training, then," Bo said, and suddenly it was a plan full of sunshine and brilliance. "Luke, we could stand him up and…"

The laughter drowned him out, Luke's head tipped back, hand on his chest and just about shaking the dust off the high shelves. Jesse's too, quieter, more of a giggle. Apparently Bo was a ridiculous fool. He'd get mad about all the ways the laughter in the room was mocking him, except that just about the time he was getting ready to give Luke a piece of his mind, the baby in his arms burbled up a tiny laugh of his own. And Bo figured, if it turned tears into laughter, it was okay – just this once – that Luke was making fun of him.


	8. Week Six: Fighting Stupid

_**Author's note: **Hey there! A little housekeeping. There are a couple of canon references I should mention: Back a couple of chapters ago, there was a brief mention of Black Jack Bender, who is from season two's The Meeting. And below you will see a slightly longer reference to Duke vs. Duke from season three. These references are just memories to the boys at this point, since we're in post-season four right now.  
_

_And that's it, along with the standard don't own/don't earn disclaimer on all of these characters. And just to say - this one's different from my usual, kind of quiet and domestic, but it was in my head for years and needed to come out. Thanks for sticking with me through another one._

* * *

**Week Six: Fighting Stupid  
**

_June 6-12, 1982_

_**Them Duke boys is like a pair of mules, out there working the fields again. Though it looks like they're managing a mite better this time, strutting up and down the field and tossing hay bales into that old work truck of Jesse's. I reckon someone must be getting close to sleeping through the night these days. Maybe all three someones, and that's a good thing. Bo's always much happier when he gets his beauty sleep and I've got it on good authority that all the girls in Hazzard appreciate it, too. 'Course, they're also partial to hot days like this one when them boys work without shirts.  
**_

"All right, you Dukes."

For once, Rosco had managed to sneak up on them. No sirens or lights, which left Luke wondering whether Boss had taken away the sheriff's cruiser again and left him with a pogo stick to hop around on, instead.

"Hey, Rosco," Bo greeted, sunnily. The man was, after all, a guest until proven otherwise. Besides, it never failed to stump Rosco when someone acted happy to see him.

Even if he was technically trespassing. On the Dukes' south forty where almost nothing ever happened, other than high grasses growing and songbirds twittering. And Duke boys sweating in the afternoon sun while their Uncle Jesse sat under a tree, supervising their work, mostly through closed eyelids.

"Boys," Rosco said and it sounded serious this time. There was probably a shame-shame somewhere in their near futures. And there was no doubt everyone knew their names.

"Hold this for me, Rosco?" Bo asked, still just as cheerful as a cat with a barn full of mice.

"Uh," the sheriff said, sticking out his hands like an obedient fool, even if his brain hadn't made up its mind that this was a good idea. Bo settled the freshly baled hay, which he'd been planning to toss onto the bed of the ancient work truck, into Rosco's arms. Watched the man's face turn red with the effort to hold it.

"Now, what can we do for you, sheriff?"

The man in question grunted something, sweat forming at his temples. Poor Rosco hadn't so much as smelled hay during his growing up years, much less harvested any. He'd seen bales stacked throughout the county, heck, he'd seen the Duke boys jump their car over more than a few of them. But Luke would bet every penny of the thirteen cents in his pocket that Rosco had never lifted a single one.

"Here, let me help you with that," he offered. Took the five steps over to where Rosco stood like the leaning tower of Pisa, tipping and ready to come down at any moment. Grabbed the bale with fingers under the twine, set his feet, (watched Bo step back out of instinct), and tossed it at the bed of the truck. Saw it bounce over the other bales that had been set in there nicely, heard the truck respond with a crotchety creak. He and Bo needed to replace the shocks on the poor thing, which was older than both of them. If they could ever find the time around changing and feeding and cleaning and soothing and singing lullabies.

"Don't mind him," Bo advised the sheriff, who was shaking out his sore arms and huffing a heavy breath as if he'd done a lick of work. "He's just showing off."

"Gyu," Rosco agreed, but it wasn't showing off, it was strictly practical. The truck sucked down gas like a drunk with a jug Jesse's moonshine, so they didn't run it from one end of the field to the other, picking up hay bales as they went. They parked it up the middle, then ran around collecting the bales, and chucking them into the flatbed of the truck from as far away as they dared. Jesse watched from the sidelines, claiming that someone had to be out there in case his fool nephews hurt themselves and needed to be taken to the hospital.

"Where's your car, Rosco?" Because the man smelled about as pleasant as a goat, when it came right down to it. Some of that sweat had been settling under his arms and collar for a bit too long.

"It's back at the…" The lawman didn't bother to finish the sentence, just pointed loosely toward the house. Which was just a hop, skip and a jump away, really. At least if you had legs and energy like Bo's. For a sedentary guy like Rosco, whose greatest expenditure of effort came from dragging his waterlogged dog out of the pond while listening to his cruiser gurgle under the surface, getting out here from the house was quite a hike. "Ijit!" Rosco recovered himself. Mostly, anyway. He was still breathing a bit too heavily. "That ain't none of your business."

"All right," Bo agreed readily. "Thanks for helping us with the baling. See you later, Rosco."

"See you…" Rosco started, then caught himself. "I will not see you later, Bo Duke, I'll see you now. You're under arrest."

Out of the corner of his eye, Luke watched Jesse moving. Up like a fox startled from its den, instantly ready to lead a crazy chase in wide circles. The white hair was just a ruse; the old man could move surprisingly quickly when the law was after his boys.

"Under arrest?" And there went Bo's temper flaring up like a barn fire. Boy never had learned that you couldn't fight stupid with your fists. "Rosco, what kind of—"

"What's the charge?" Luke asked smoothly, hands on his hips, head slightly tilted to the side. Just curious, that was all. One of his elbows lightly tapped against Bo's arm, a reminder for the boy to keep his cool.

Rosco reached for his own waist, putting them both on alert. Guns and handcuffs were kept down there. But then again, so were pockets, and inside of one of those, a yellowed handkerchief. Rosco mopped his forehead in a way that announced that if he could charge the Duke boys with risking a sheriff's life by haying in June (and making him walk out to the fields to find them) he'd do it. Luke propped his elbow up onto Bo's sun-browned shoulder to wait for the fountain of brilliance that was sure to drip from Rosco's lips. They hadn't done anything illegal – heck they hadn't even done anything more interesting than buying baby booties in Rhuebottom's General Store in over a month. Jesse sidled up to stand at Bo's other shoulder; a line of Duke men that a sheriff would be a fool to try and cross.

"Baby, oo," but Rosco's mother hadn't birthed any smart boys. "Baby-napping."

"Baby-napping? Have you lost your mind?" There went Bo's temper again, crackling and spitting, consuming whatever calm he'd attained. Luke left his cousin to blustering and complaining about how it couldn't be baby-napping when all they'd done was step out onto their own porch, and there the baby was. It gave him a minute to think things through, about how Rosco had known where to find them and the fact that he'd come on foot. How they'd left the baby with Daisy at the house this morning because he'd been fussy and miserable, and she must have answered the door when Rosco came banging. Must have refused him entry then sent him walking up here in all those ways she had of getting men to do what she wanted. Just to buy herself time to pack up the little one and head off somewhere safe from Rosco, in case he had it in his head to take the baby into custody.

_**Seems to me that girl done the right thing. Most likely old Rosco would interrogate the poor critter, then lock him up in a cell. A bread and water diet, and the poor kid ain't even got any teeth yet.**_

"Rosco," that was Jesse, butting into the argument. Just as angry as Bo, but far more logical. And stepping right up close to the lawman in question in case his nephews had to make a run for it. "Who exactly said we kidnapped that there baby?"

All told, that was a really good question. If someone had complained, maybe they'd know who the mother was.

"Ijit! Don't you—don't you threaten me, Jesse Duke." The old man's hands went up to show no harm meant. Totally innocent and agreeable, even if the mound of his stomach was right up against Rosco's belly in a way that would make reaching for his gun awkward and difficult. "No one said it, no one had to say it! If you Dukes got a baby, then there ain't no other way you got it other than kidnapping it."

"How do you figure?" Jesse asked, with a funny tip and jerk of his head that suggested that his nephews would do well to start backing away slowly. Which was silly, they could outrun Rosco in about two steps, as long as Jesse kept him from getting to his gun. (And if he did manage to get to his gun, there was no such thing as being far enough away.)

"Daisy's belly wasn't never swollen," the sheriff announced with utter pride in his irrefutable reasoning. "Which means that baby ain't a Duke, and if he ain't a Duke that means he's been kidnapped by you Dukes!" Truly dizzying logic. "And that's why you boys are going to jail," oh, that was a gleeful little grin on Rosco's face. Luke was close enough to feel the way Bo's body tensed with the urge to wipe it off. "And that little baby is going to the orphanage, while Boss figures out who you stole it from. And then he's gonna give it back, and get a reward!" Silly little khee of a giggle at the end of that charming little outburst, one that announced, without words, that Rosco anticipated getting fifty percent of fifty percent of fifty percent of that reward.

"Just because he ain't Daisy's don't mean he ain't a Duke." You couldn't fight stupid with fists, but Bo was on the verge of giving it a try. "He's mine." Or confessing.

"Gij!"

Rosco said it, but the tone of surprise could as easily have come from Luke or Jesse. This, right here, was Bo staking claim to a kid that he'd done nothing but deny responsibility for all along. It was a bluff, it had to be. If it wasn't, Luke was about ready to beat the tar out of Bo for lying to him for this long, never mind that Rosco would haul them both to jail for assault and battery if a fistfight broke out in front of him.

"That ain't your baby," Rosco reasoned, when his wits came back about him. "On account of, you ain't never liked kids a moment in your life." Well, if disliking kids was a method of birth control, there had to be a lot of mamas and daddies out there who would be surprised to hear it. "Besides, he don't even look like you. He's got Luke's eyes." As if that explained anything at all when the two of them were cousins, and it was Grandma Duke's eyes that Jesse always swore Luke had. She was Bo's grandmother every bit as much as she was Luke's and Rosco was old enough to have known the woman. (Just the slightest pang hit Luke at that realization – how well Rosco had known the Dukes that came before, including the parents that Luke could only remember in bits and pieces.)

"He ain't got nobody's eyes," Jesse growled, his face hardened down in a way that Luke hadn't seen since their moonshining days. Protective over family and tradition and barely tolerating Rosco's nonsense. "Every Duke baby in the history of Duke babies started out with light blue eyes. Luke's just the only one who kept them after that first year."

But Rosco was not to be deterred from the keen observation with which his years in law enforcement had provided him. "You ain't fooling me none, Jesse Duke." The kid could not be Bo's because he had Luke's eyes.

Bo turned to catch his attention, looking down at him which was as annoying as the unspoken challenge and the tiniest curl of a smirk at the corner of his lips.

_Just how important is your pride and stubbornness when the baby is in danger?_

Not important at all.

Luke sighed, not because of what he was going to say next, but because somehow, after all these weeks of raising the kid, Bo had gotten the upper hand on him.

"Then he's mine, Rosco."

"He's—" that stumped the sheriff. Made him mumble meaningless words. "He's yours? But, I thought he was—" pause there, shaky finger coming out to point to Bo's chest. "—Yours? He can't be both of yours," which meant someone must have explained the birds and bees to the fool somewhere in the last couple of weeks. "Unless—are you two married?"

_**You know, I still ain't decided which of them two boys would look worse in a dress. **_

The sky was blue with only the lightest of fluffy clouds. Luke was fully aware of that fact, and of the sun's bright rays, because he'd tipped his head back to laugh.

"No, we ain't married," Bo complained right back at Rosco, full of disgusted indignation. "We're cousins!"

You couldn't fight stupid with fists, but then again, Bo was only half adept at fighting it with logic. Rosco was still trying to put together the important facts here. They were both claiming the baby, they shared the name Duke, and though he hadn't been invited to any wedding—

"We ain't married, Rosco," Luke said in an attempt to stop the sheriff's hamster wheel of a brain before it wore itself out completely. "Bo's too tall for a wedding dress anyway. His knees would stick out."

_**That's true enough, Luke, but then you don't exactly have an hourglass figure and alabaster skin, neither.**_

"You got a warrant to arrest these here boys?" Jesse put in quickly, before Bo could get around to starting a fight over which of them would be the bride (or before Rosco could get too far in trying to picture Bo all decked out in white lace).

"No," Rosco admitted, which meant it had only been a half-baked plan on Boss's part that had sent him out here. And that was good. It was those plans that had time to get baked to a toasty brown that were truly dangerous.

"And do you have a warrant to search this here farm for a baby?" Jesse's chin was tipped down. If he'd been wearing his reading glasses, he would have been leveling a glare over the rims. As it was, there was nothing there to obstruct the mean look he was giving Rosco.

"Uh, no," the lawman admitted, taking a step back. It was time for him to go now, and he knew it. All Jesse had to do was point in the general direction of the house and the farmyard where Rosco must have left his cruiser, and the sheriff started to slink away, tail tucked. The man had to be getting up there in years now – he wasn't that much younger than Jesse – but then again he'd never looked nearly as old as he did now.

"Hey, Rosco," Bo called after him like an eight-year-old kid looking for a playmate. Rosco turned, even if he should have known better. "Since you're going that way anyway, could you carry this to the barn for me?" Bo's fingers were caught under the twine of another bale of hay, lifting it just far enough off the ground to make it look like he was going to toss it to the sheriff, underhand.

Funny, how that made Rosco mumble and move quicker and with a great deal more determination toward his car.

* * *

"What do you mean, he ain't got a birthday?"

_**See, now, there's old Cooter, come a-visiting. Jesse didn't need to worry none about him, and the boys was wrong, too. Just look at how he sits there on the Dukes' porch and bounces that baby on his knee like an old pro (or like an uncle who don't necessarily have to worry about calming him down after he gets him worked up). Grease stains in the creases of his fingers, despite how Luke made him scrub himself up to the elbows before touching the kid. Yep, those big hands wrapped around that tiny ribcage are made for holding onto carburetors and camshafts, not little babies. Still, he's managing just fine.**_

"Well, he's got a birthday," Luke reasoned, ever logical. Leaning against the porch railing and sucking down lemonade like it was beer on a Friday night. (And it had been so long since they'd gone juking or just plain carousing that Bo couldn't swear he knew what "Friday night" even meant anymore. He recognized Sunday mornings, because some assembly of Dukes still went to church, but other than that, one day might as well have the same name as the next.) "We just don't know when it is."

The kid wasn't any less fussy than he had been yesterday, but Daisy had to work and there were no clouds on the horizon, so the Duke men had decided to take today off from baling and get back to it tomorrow. It wouldn't dry out that quick. And besides, Jesse needed a rest from all that supervising.

And it was hot. No breeze on the porch and Bo had already had to move up to the very top step when the shade had retreated from the lower ones, leaving his empty lemonade glass at the bottom. He was going to have to retrieve that before Daisy saw where he'd left it and took to lecturing him within inches of his life. Didn't he know they only had five glasses left after he'd chipped that one? Yeah, he knew, he'd been hearing about it for the dozen years or so since the incident in question happened.

"He's somewhere around three-and-a-half months old," Bo clarified. "But since there wasn't no note with him, we don't know the exact day he was born."

Cooter hunched himself down to be eye-to-eye with the drooling mess of a kid that he was holding upright on his knee, like maybe if he stared hard enough, he'd receive telepathic messages explaining anything and everything about where the baby had come from. Bo shrugged and figured that if it somehow worked, at least they'd have answers.

"What's his name?"

Luke shook his head and flattened his lips in that way he always did when someone asked a dumb question. "No note means no note," he explained, hand gesturing out into the air in front of him like that would put an end to this line of discussion.

"We been calling him Bloke," Bo jumped in. Endured a mean glare from Luke that informed him that he had at no time agreed to call the boy that. But that was just too bad. Bo liked it, and Jesse and Daisy seemed to, too.

"And you don't know which of y'all's he is." That part, Cooter's brain had wrapped itself around from the beginning. Two Duke boys stalwartly making their way through all the girls in the Tri-County area, and maybe he figured this particular set of consequences was inevitable.

"Nope," Luke answered.

Bo had tried to figure, as he'd watched their friend make silly noises and otherwise get fully acquainted with the baby and the story behind him being in their lives, what it was that he wanted now. The kid was only a mite easier these days than he had been in those first few weeks. Still crying in the night often enough, stinking up his diapers and making a general nuisance of himself. Still, for all that, he guessed he'd rather be the boy's father than his uncle. Mostly, anyway, though he'd still want Luke to be fully involved in bringing the kid up. Like building the General, it'd be twice the fun and the kid would be all the better for the two of them working together.

But though he mostly wanted to be the daddy, he had no interest at all in getting married. So it would be for the best if the mother never showed up gain. Except he couldn't quite reconcile that to himself, either. Every kid should have a chance to know its mother.

"Shoot," Luke was saying, interrupting Bo's circling thoughts. "If you'd been around once in a while, you would have known all this stuff already."

"Well, buddyroe," came right back at him, in between the sh-sh-sh noises Cooter was making in the same rhythm as his bouncing knee. That old game of this-is-the-way-the-huntsman-walks, just played quietly and carefully because Bloke was too little to understand or try to hold on. Heck, he hadn't entirely mastered holding up his own head when being held like this, so Cooter couldn't jostle him too much. "You ain't been to see me, neither." And that was how it usually worked out. One or the other of the Dukes caused the General some manner of grievous injury and they ended up at the garage, bartering for parts or just making promises about payment that would be deferred until next month and then again to the one after that. "Besides, without you boys coming around every other day," was a gross exaggeration. It wasn't more than twice a week that they made more of a mess than they could fix themselves. And it was usually Luke's fault when they did. "Looking for my help, and without you running Rosco into the drink every day," now that part was absolutely accurate, and _that _was usually Bo's fault. "I had to figure out some other way of making money."

He'd feel guilty about that if only he wasn't so busy looking across the farmyard at the poor General, who hadn't gotten half the attention he was used to.

Then Bloke's little vocalizations started to sound like a prelude to tears again, so Bo looked back at him. Cooter was still bouncing him to distract him from whatever fussing he wanted to get up to, and the inevitable fit got put off for another couple of minutes.

"But, I wouldn't worry about me none, because y'all gave me a chance to put together another engine like I done before for that Grand Prix driver."

_**Now, I reckon y'all might remember that one. That was back when Boss Hogg had himself a race and was going to confiscate all the losing cars for himself. Cooter built that fancy engine to sell after the race, but he busted up his ankle, so Luke had to drive for him. And them Duke boys fought like schoolkids over who was gonna win, but they ended up tied in the end, and Cooter sold his engine. So it all worked out just fine, and I reckon that's all that matters.**_

"Took me the better part of a month to build it, but I just sold it last week," Cooter informed them.

Bloke's noises got a little more insistent then, took on just that much more of an irritated edge. Cooter got to his feet and took to bouncing the kid a little more seriously on one of his flabby arms. Bo was impressed – the little one wasn't as little as he'd once been, and it was kind of like awkwardly hoisting a bag of flour to hold him like Cooter was. There were some muscles hidden in the loose skin of those arms.

"Anyways, next time y'all are in the Boar's Nest, drinks are on me."

"Don't spend it all in one place," Luke advised about whatever money Cooter made on the deal. Had to've been a lot to make him go offering up free drinks like that, but then again, Luke had a point. More than once, Cooter had drunk up a whole month's worth of paid bills in one whiskey-soaked weekend.

"You ain't got to worry about me none," their friend informed them with that lopsided, half-proud-of-things-he'd-do-better-to-be-ashamed-of grin. "I ain't no fool. And I ain't the one who went off and got some girl pregnant. Come on now, which one of you done it?"

Luke shook his head and drained the last of the lemonade in his glass. He always had been a deliberate fool about such things. Dumb, if you asked Bo, to take your time drinking a glass of lemonade when it would only stay cold for so long. Better to gulp it. Even if the flavor that was fresh in Luke's mouth had long since gone bitter in Bo's.

"Cooter," Luke said after he'd swallowed, but he wasn't about to answer their friend's question. Bo could understand that. Saying the kid was his would mean admitting that he'd made one hell of a mistake, and saying it wasn't would be like denying his own flesh and blood. "Maybe you'd better let me take him." Because Bloke's face was scrunching up in that way that either meant a full-out fit was on the way or a desperately dirty diaper was in the making.

"Naw, we're fine, ain't we, Bloke?" Luke pressed his lips together again, but there was nothing wrong with calling the baby that for now, and his cousin was just going to have to get used to it, because everyone else had embraced it.

Bloke didn't entirely agree with Cooter's assessment of exactly how fine they were and started in with that piercing cry he always let out before the worst tantrums started.

"Cooter," Bo warned, but their friend wasn't doing a whole lot of listening. To Luke, to him, to Bloke.

Cooter left off bouncing the kid and lifted him up over his head with both hands. Airplane, the world's oldest trick.

"How's that, little guy?" he asked. "Like that? I ain't never see a Duke boy that didn't like to fly."

"Uh, Cooter," Luke tried. But there was no stopping him, apparently. Poor little Bloke was being flown around over Cooter's head, looking less and less—

_**Look out, Cooter! Incoming!**_

And then things started to come out of the baby's mouth, onto Cooter's upturned face and into his hair.

It was a good thing Bo was right there to grab Bloke out of his hands. Otherwise the poor kid might have been dropped in Cooter's shock.

"Sorry, buddy," Bo mumbled.

"We tried to warn you," Luke added. "Come on inside, you can take a shower."

"You know," Cooter said, wiping an arm across his face and eyes. It didn't do much except smear everything around. "Mrs. Grant's oil pan done that very same thing to me just last week."

Luke laughed and held the door open for their friend.

* * *

_**Now, there's a familiar sight. Sort of. It's an orange car, gliding down the road and kicking up dust. Still, something about it just don't look quite right.**_

"Bo." It was all very normal, like any page out of the book of most of their lives. Him telling his cousin to pay attention, to slow down and look out for what lay ahead, except for that hard plastic cutting into the flesh of his left arm. And the tightness of Bo's posture, how he sat with elbows tucked instead of jutting in all directions.

Plus, there were no sirens echoing off the trees and boulders and bluffs around them.

Sunday driving on a Friday, just about as adventurously as anyone's grandmother. Well, anyone's grandmother but theirs. Jesse's tales about Grandma Duke had her being one of the best moonshine runners of her day. So maybe they were driving around like Rosco's grandmother, as long as she was more capable behind the wheel than her grandson ever had been.

"It's fine, Luke," Bo informed him. But then again, Bo's definition of "fine" always had left a little something to be desired.

The red clay passing underneath their wheels was rutted and cracked where the spring rains had given way to the relentlessly baking sun. Erosion left some pretty impressive gaps and gullies in its wake and the whole point of coming out here was to be soothing. To take Jesse's suggestion about how the baby, whose moods had been about as upbeat as a thunderstorm, might just settle under the rock and sway (but not bump) of a ride in the car.

"He's a Duke, after all," had been the reasoning amongst them, the refrain he and Bo had repeated to each other as they'd settled the kid into his car seat (that he was going to outgrow soon, and where were they going to get money for a bigger one?) and filled Luke's olive green duffel bag with diapers and bottles and wipes and blankets and clothes and quite possibly a dozen bricks, too. Just in case of emergency or disaster or a halfwit sheriff trying to arrest them on baby-napping charges again.

Sure, the baby was a Duke, but then so were they and even if they were driving ten miles an hour under the speed limit – and it was still a bit too fast to be a really good idea – being in the car was like breathing. Something they had to do at least every now and then if they were going to survive.

The General was Bo's choice – "He's a Duke after all," that refrain one more time – and strapping the baby between them in the front seat had been Luke's. Otherwise he would have been relegated to the back like a sack of oats, looking after the baby and leaving Bo to drive any way he pleased. At least this way they were equally frustrated.

"He's sleeping, ain't he?" Bo asked, as if that would prove just how fine everything was.

"For now, but he won't be if you start bumping him around."

Bo let out a little huff, bit his lip and nodded his head. Driving slow wasn't what he wanted, but it was still far better than sitting in the house, taking turns using a foot to jostle the bassinet, and listening to the baby scream about how little that effort was appreciated.

With a motion so smooth it must have just about taken all his self-control to maintain, Bo turned off of Blackberry Lane and onto the paved surface of Riverbend Road. Not as many bumps here and it was still far enough off the main roads that they ought to avoid traffic. Bo let his foot rest a little heavier on the gas pedal; Luke left it alone. Looked out at the scenery passing by and it was almost like coming home from the Marines again. He'd missed seeing the roads and lakes and mountains that much.

"Think it's safe?" Bo asked, pointing around his grip on the steering wheel at a pull off they'd used many dozen times before when they went fishing from the rugged bank of the river. Luke had no idea whether stopping now would wake the little one or not, but he was willing to take the chance. The silver ribbon sliding through the trees to their left looked cool and inviting, and though they couldn't swim or fish today, just being close would be more refreshing than sitting next to open windows and slow-spinning fans.

The tires crunched on loose gravel as Bo pulled into their usual, heavily-shaded spot. Rolled to a stop, turned off the engine and the two of them held their breath and everything else for a few dozen heartbeats, waiting to see if the hollering would start up again.

"Luke," Bo said when he deemed it safe. Seemed pretty risky to start talking in this confined space. Sure, Bo was keeping his voice low for now, but he wouldn't be able to manage that for long. Luke put a finger to his lips and pointed out his own window. Bo got the hint and they both slid out as carefully as they could, watching their knees and feet and everything else that might knock against the car seat and wake the crying machine. Their fishing log, the remnants of an old-growth oak that had fallen in the hurricane of seventy-nine, was just ahead but too far away from their charge, so Luke opted to sit on the engine-warm steel of the General's hood instead. It wasn't very comfortable, but he could see through the windshield and hear through the open side windows if the little guy needed him.

Bo tested the temperature of the hood and seemed to decide that standing was preferable. "Who do you suppose Bloke's mama is?" he said to finish what he'd started in the car.

Luke shrugged – they'd had this conversation before, and maybe it had been in a different tone, been uglier or more accusatory, but it ended the same way. They didn't know.

Besides, opening his mouth might lead to him telling Bo to stop calling the baby by that ridiculous name, and admitting he hated it would only lead to it being said louder and more often.

"I mean, she'd have to be crazy, giving up her own child like this," Bo explained. "And I can't figure either one of us would go out with someone like that."

The best policy, Luke figured, was not to bring up Bo's dalliance with Diane Benson. She wasn't exactly responsible and she definitely had her priorities all wrong, but she was not this baby's mother. The timing didn't work out. And she wasn't worth the time it would take to argue over her.

"I guess," he said instead, "whoever she was, she must have figured we could do better for the kid than she could."

"Still," Bo put in, jamming his hands into his back pockets and kicking a stone from here to there. Head tipped down like that, he looked every bit the little boy, with watermelon lingering on his breath, confessing his naughty deeds to a semi-patient uncle. "She should have stuck around. Didn't she want to see her child grow up? Don't she want him to know her?"

Luke shrugged and leaned back against the windshield. The glass under his back was cooler than the metal under his hind end, but the engine was starting to cool, now. "Probably didn't want to marry you." Bo gave him a hard glance. _That wasn't funny, Luke._ This was supposed to be a serious conversation. Luke let go of a heavy breath and Bo went back to his deep study of the rocks at his feet. "Maybe she figures he's better off not knowing her."

"Well then, she really is crazy. Ain't no one better off for not knowing their mother."

Bo would say that. He was far too young when his mother passed to retain any memories of her at all. Yellowing photos under plastic in a book kept on a high shelf; that was all he had. And the stories. She could sing, she was runner up for homecoming queen, she was young when she married. She had a sunny personality and a gullible nature that made all the Duke men enjoy teasing her. That was all Bo knew and it bothered him.

And his cousin had absolutely no idea how much worse he'd be bothered if he'd known his mother just a little, only enough to make it hurt worse than any sucker punch ever had that she was gone.

"Could have been worse," Luke offered up. "She could have left him in the orphanage."

The serious frown on Bo's face went to prove that he didn't like that idea one bit. Whether it was because he was opposed to kids growing up in orphanages or maybe thought this particular kid would do better to be raised in one, Luke couldn't tell.

And he couldn't be sure how he felt about it, either. The baby was a Duke and deserved to be raised with his heritage. But almost anybody in Hazzard – Boss and Rosco aside – could raise a child better than he and Bo could.

"He'll be fine," Bo decided, lifting his head and looking straight into Luke's eyes. "Heck, she shouldn't have left him, but she did, and now he's got us. All we had was Uncle Jesse and we turned out all right, right?"

That was debatable. But, sure, he'd let Bo go on believing that. It seemed to make him happy.

"Yeah, he'll be fine. Come on," he said, sitting up and turning sideways on his butt to slide off the edge of the hood. "Let's drive around some more."

Best to get his cousin moving again, before standing around for too long gave him more deep thoughts. Bo was far too pretty to be getting worry lines over things he couldn't change.


	9. Week Seven: Family Men and Fickle Women

_**Author's note:** Just a pause to point out another quick canon reference here, this time to _In This Corner, Luke Duke_. And now back to your regularly scheduled programming._

* * *

**Week Seven: Family Men and Fickle Women  
**

_June 13-19, 1982_

_**Here we are, spending another noisy mess of a morning in what ought to be the quiet of the Dukes' living room. Ain't it strange seeing them three grown men huddled over one itty-bitty baby, trying to figure out what's wrong and how to fix it? At least Uncle Jesse's got a little practice. Bo and Luke ain't got the first idea what to do about nothing. Heck, without their uncle's guidance and wisdom, them boys would have been trying to change that baby's oil and replace his carburetor, because the only thing them two have ever read from one end to the other is a car repair manual.**_

"Well, it's a little early," Jesse admitted. "Even Luke was six months, and he was earlier than you was, Bo."

Stupid smirk on his cousin's face that had no right to be so proud of itself. Or to be there at all when it had been days since there'd been peace in the house. Where they were stuck because driving around wasn't keeping Bloke calm anymore, and Jesse didn't want them on the porch upsetting the livestock.

(Bo had wanted to ask why baby livestock were always allowed to upset the humans, but then he didn't figure he ought to get himself berated like a little boy in front of Bloke. The kid would never respect his authority if he saw him getting subjected to a Jesse lecture.)

"Then again, I recollect that the Andersons' third boy, or maybe it was the fourth…"

Bloke let out an interrupting cry that would deafen a mole under three feet of Georgia clay, not to mention what it did to Bo, who was holding him. The kid hadn't yet learned about Jesse's yarns, that they meandered and flip-flopped like a mountain road full of switchbacks, but no matter how many twists and turns they went through, you were supposed to hush up and listen. It made Bo wonder about when he'd learned it for himself, because he sure couldn't remember ever not knowing it. Of course, he couldn't remember the days before he was old enough to get threatened with whippings, either, but obviously someone as little as Bloke couldn't be whipped.

"Jack," Jesse went on. "He was born in forty-seven, I think. Or thirty-four…"

Luke, across the little coffee table in the hard backed rocking chair they'd dragged from Jesse's bedroom to the living room a few weeks back, snorted and shook his head. At Jesse's memory, at Bo's near-deafness, at the fact that even if the west windows were open to catch the coolest breeze the day was likely to produce, it was already hot in here. He was sweating, Jesse was sweating, Luke was past sweating and well onto swimming, and Bloke was just plain old wet. Drool everywhere from his nose to his neck, sweat everywhere else. And the couch might just have been the hottest place Bo could have chosen to sit.

"Forty-three," Jesse settled on, giving Luke a hard stare. His cousin's hand went through those dark curls, but otherwise he didn't react to the silent scold. (Bo was going to have to be the one to teach Bloke discipline and manners. Luke was smart and he was hard-working, but he wasn't always respectful and he almost never said 'yes, sir,' even when he really should have.) "I didn't midwife him," Jesse offered, maybe as an explanation for why he couldn't remember the exact year. "But I heard tell that he was born with two teeth. So they can get them even earlier than it is with the little guy, there."

And that, of all things, got a frowning reaction out of Luke. Could have been signaling disbelief in an old story that Jesse couldn't even have claimed to see with his own eyes, or because someone, somewhere, in nineteen thirty-four or forty-seven or any time at all, had beaten him at something. Luke didn't like to come in second, and though he might concede defeat to Bloke, who was possibly his son and at least his kin, he wasn't too keen on losing to a stranger.

"Now, when you was teething, Bo, your Aunt Lavinia swore on her special ointment."

Which may or may not have involved some amount of moonshine. In any case, the recipe had been stored in their aunt's head and it wasn't like they could consult her now.

"And I seem to recall Luke's mama used to wrap ice in a towel."

Yeah, they'd tried that. It hadn't stopped the hollering, and if the kid didn't go ahead and just grow that tooth all the way in already, Bo was going to find Doc Willis in his traveling dentist's office (except the Doc had quit his practice to become some sort of private investigator) and get the dang thing extracted. It wasn't doing anyone any good showing up early anyway, not as long as Bloke was still mostly bottle feeding and otherwise only slurping down scrambled eggs.

"I don't rightly know what Daisy's daddy done."

Of course he didn't. Daisy had been born in Chickasaw and raised there until she her dad passed on. Her mother had died in childbirth and her father hadn't ever been healthy afterward. The doctors said he died of cancer six years later, but Jesse always swore it was a badly broken heart that he'd tried to hold together for Daisy's sake, but eventually the pieces fell away.

And just this morning the girl had run off to the Boar's Nest. Some pretext about needing to organize the silverware by size and amount of tarnish but they all knew that she was just about as sick of Bloke's misery as the rest of them were. She just had a handy excuse to escape it.

"But I reckon you'd best just keep doing what you're doing, Bo," Jesse had concluded.

Which was lousy advice, really, about the last thing Bo wanted to hear. But he did it anyway, offered Bloke his slobbery forefinger and let the kid keep gumming it. It was just about as disgusting a thing as Bo had ever done, but then again, it might just have been the first thing he'd been able to do right, easily and better than Luke when it came to caring for this baby. For all that his older cousin could change diapers like a pro, his finger had been rejected. Bloke turned his head to the side and screamed even louder when the offending finger got offered to him, because it was too rough or too fat or just plain tasted like a crotchety pessimist.

"It can't take more than another day or so before that tooth breaks through and he's more comfortable," was probably meant to be encouragement from his uncle. "Unless another one starts right after."

Bo started running his tongue around the inside of his mouth, counting just how many teeth he had and trying to remember biology classes from years ago. Did children have more or fewer teeth than adults?

"Is it going to hurt him every time?" he asked, and his voice might just have squeaked at the end of the question.

"Oh, sure," Jesse answered. "And these front ones are easy. Just wait until he gets to them bigger ones around the sides."

Oh, they really needed to find Doc Willis before then and convince him to be a dentist just long enough to get all Bloke's teeth pulled (painlessly, of course) before they could emerge. As long as he never ate anything firmer than pudding, he wouldn't miss them, and Bo would have half a chance of a good night's sleep and slobber-free hands sometime in the near future.

* * *

Ginger ale. Cooter might just have choked when he came sauntering by the tiny table that the Duke boys had commandeered at the dim edges of the Boar's Nest, grabbed Luke's mug like he always had, and swallowed down a mouthful.

"That ain't beer," his friend informed him helpfully. Though it didn't stop him from taking a second sip.

"Ginger ale," Luke agreed, and he'd say that Cooter should have known from a look, but then again, Boar's Nest beer was known to either have too much head or too little. Some days it was as flat as soda.

Cooter raised his eyebrows and let out a low whistle. Set Luke's mug down and signaled Sally Jo, who was waitressing tonight, before sitting down in the chair across from Luke. The one Bo had abandoned a while back.

"Ain't you just the family man?" his friend asked. Luke committed only one shoulder to the shrug, ran his other hand through his hair and watched the dancers. Hoped the conversation would die before it could even get started, and focused himself on Bo in the middle of the crowd. He was easy to spot, thatch of blond bouncing well above the height of the girls he was with. Hard to say who his dancing partner was; might as well have been the whole room for all that every girl's eye followed him. "You ain't been here in weeks, and when you finally come out, you're drinking ginger ale. Never thought I'd see the day," Cooter mused, despite Luke's lack of participation in the discussion.

"Here you go, darlin'," Sally Jo interrupted, putting a beer in front of Cooter with a wink. "Anything for you, honey?" she asked Luke, got a shaken head for an answer. "Let me know if you need anything else," she said, patting Cooter's shoulder, and then she was gone, leaving them to a conversation that Luke figured was unavoidable.

"What are you doing out here anyways, if you ain't going to drink and you ain't going to flirt?"

"Bo's flirting enough for us both," he answered, and as if to prove the point, his cousin let out a gleeful _yee-haw_ that could probably be heard in North Carolina. "And I'm drinking," he reminded his friend, raising his mug in a mock toast before sipping down the slightest bit. "Uncle Jesse kicked us out," he admitted into the lull that followed.

"Kicked you out?" Cooter said, nearly choking on the gulp of beer he'd just taken. Served him right for drinking too fast to begin with. "You're telling me that your Uncle Jesse, the same man that's been telling you not to waste so much time at the Boar's Nest since you were old enough to come here on your own – that's the uncle that sent you here?"

As if he and Bo had any other uncle to be sending them anywhere at all.

Luke ran his hand through his hair again, to keep himself awake as much as anything. How Bo was managing to dance, tired as he had to be, Luke would never know. Then again, in that blond brain of his, girls might as well be fireworks: bright, colorful, always moving and just noisy enough to make sure his attention never wavered.

"He said to come here and not be home until after ten." And if a watch could be worn out by just staring at it, his would be darn near useless by now. Time had gone and slowed down on him the minute the General Lee had roared eastward from the edge of the farmyard. "I reckon he'll call you later to check where we were," he added with a wry smile and a nostalgic pang for the days when his biggest worry was that his uncle would call around to check on his whereabouts. Figured that soon enough he'd be the one checking on a wayward child. Took a second to wonder who the kid's friends would be and realized that none of the guys he'd grown up with had babies yet. The smile faded, and he used a finger to draw a line through the sweat on his mug. "He said we was talking nonsense."

"Was you?"

Luke shrugged, picked up his mug and drank another few drops. Too sweet, but he didn't want to dance and he couldn't sit here and do nothing. Sipping ginger ale wasn't his idea of a perfect night, but he could prove the passage of time by the slowly emptying mug.

"He said I was talking to myself in the barn." But he hadn't been, not really. Oh, sure, he'd been the only human in the barn, milking Bonnie Mae while a gaggle of chickens clucked around his feet, and he'd been talking. But it wasn't what it seemed, it was just him doing what he'd been doing for the past few weeks. Talking quietly, narrating his day, because the baby cried less when he got talked or sung to. And he'd milked Bonnie Mae a dozen times with the kid strapped to him in a sling or nearby in the bassinet, so it wasn't the first time he'd explained the technique for milking goats. It just so happened that this time, the little guy was inside with Bo. That was all.

"That don't sound too bad to me," Cooter consoled. "I talk to myself in the garage a lot." Well, yes, but Cooter was a bit of a fool and everyone knew it. In fact, him acting like Cooter might have been half of what had Jesse concerned.

"Yeah, well, later me and Bo was talking about teething rings." Cooter's eyebrows went up. Clearly there really was cause for concern when Duke boys were reduced to detailed discussions of what a baby might like to chew on. "Because the kid ain't never had any interest in none of the pacifiers Daisy got him." Luke had always been rather proud of him for that. "But he's started getting teeth, and he was miserable with that first one. So we figured we should get him something," other than Bo's fingers, "to chew on for the next one."

Cooter was fascinated with this talk of babies, it was clear. What with the way he was watching the girls with their short skirts and their long hair, the sway of their bodies as they danced. Bo, at least, seemed to have settled on one of them as a dance partner, or she'd settled on him. Either way he was snuggled up all close and personal with that girl – Luke couldn't recall her first name, but remembered that Bo's efforts to sway her interest in high school had been fruitless. Duvall, her last name was, and she sat behind his cousin in every class where the teacher was lazy enough to sit the students alphabetically. Luke could remember her studiously ignoring Bo, which was hard to do when his cousin was big and loud, and their lockers were side-by-side. Luke graduated after Bo's ninth grade year, but he knew his cousin never managed to get the attentions of the Duvall girl.

"So what did you decide?" Cooter was asking. Apparently about the baby and his need for a teething ring, go figure.

"We didn't decide nothing," Luke reminded him. "Jesse kicked us out before we could. But Bo suggested that mouth guard Jesse made me for that boxing match a couple years back."

"The one made out of an old tire?" Cooter asked with a disbelieving snort.

"Well, it didn't kill me, so I reckon it wouldn't have killed the kid. But of course it's way too big. So I said we could get some plastic tubing at Rhuebottoms and cut a little length of it for him to chew on, but then we realized that we've got some cheap grade hose in the barn that we used to repair the water pump in the tractor back in spring—" Cooter was grinning, either at their brilliance of their foolishness. It was hard to tell. "Anyway, that's when Jesse told us to get out for a while, to come here and he and Daisy would take care of the kid for a few hours."

"Well," his friend said, then paused to take a deep swig of his beer. Ran a hand across his lips to wipe away the extra moisture and Luke took another sip of his ginger ale. That much closer to the bottom of the mug, that much closer to getting home. "At least you know little Bloke is in good hands."

Good hands – well, Daisy had probably changed him into six different outfits by now, cooing all the while about how pretty he was, same as she used to do with her dolls. And it would be an amazing feat if Jesse's eyes were still open by this point. Naps snuck up on the old man around this time in the evening. Luke shook his head at the ridiculousness of it all.

"You don't like that, do you?" Bo let out another _yee-haw_ down at the other end of the room, and it got echoed by a high pitched _woo!_ that might or might not have come from his dancing partner. "Calling him Bloke?"

Well, aside from the fact that it was a silly name and worse than that, had been made up by Rocso's sputtering tongue, Luke had no problem with it. Except—

"The kid ought to have a real name." There was that.

Cooter drained his beer and signaled for another one. Squinted at Luke in that way he sometimes would a stubborn fan belt that didn't want to work itself loose. Luke went back to watching the dancers, or trying.

Cooter was mumbling something again. "Huh?" he asked, turning back to his friend.

"I said, why don't you just name him, then?"

It probably did look that simple from the outside. Maybe it was; maybe he was a fool. Then again, no one else in the family had suggested a proper name for the baby, either.

"I reckon the baby's daddy ought to name him." And they didn't know who that was. But more than that—"His mama ought to name him." That might just have come out a little louder and with a lot more temper than he meant it to. "Bo was asking me a few days ago, how could his mama give him up? What was she thinking? And I told him what I figure he wanted to hear. That it would be okay, that we could raise him without her. But heck, we can't even figure out what to get him to chew on when he's teething, other than Bo's finger, so how are we ever going to deal with real stuff?" Like sickness and broken bones, schooling and manners and girls breaking his heart – not to mention coming up with an answer to _what happened to my mother? Why didn't she love me?_

"Well, now," Cooter put in. Had to pause there to smile at Sally Jo when she showed up with another beer and a shaking head at how poorly Luke was doing at matching his friend, drink for drink. Well, Cooter never was a good one to go up against that way, anyway. He could drink fast and hard until all of a sudden you'd find him sleeping under the table. "You got your Uncle Jesse to help you with that."

Luke snickered at that one and waved Sally Jo off from getting him a refill so she'd go away. She was a sweet enough girl, but she was also Daisy's best friend and Luke didn't need her overhearing this conversation and reporting it back. Or spreading it on to the other women in town, all of whom would have a solid opinion on exactly how poorly the Duke boys were doing at raising a baby.

"See over there," Luke said when she was gone. Pointed loosely in the direction of Bo, who seemed to be dancing with the entire female population in the bar again. Moving from one to the next in a warped version of a square dance where he was everyone's partner. "That's the result of Uncle Jesse's best efforts." After all, Bo was his third shot at it. And more than that, the only one of the three of them that Jesse had raised from infancy. "Me and Bo got to figure out a way to do better than Jesse." Or the whole county would end up littered with Duke kids that didn't know who their mamas or daddies were, all of them driving fast and recklessly and screaming _yee-haw_, like Bo was right now.

Cooter craned his neck to get a good view of the dance floor and let loose one of those silly smiles that his younger self used to wear all the time. The kind that he somehow imagined would get him out of trouble, but always seemed to have the opposite effect.

"He looks like he's doing fine out there," was the verdict, followed by another long swallow of beer. Sally Jo was going to have a busy night, just keeping up with Cooter. (But she'd get a handsome tip for her efforts, because Cooter was generous. As long as he stayed conscious, that was.) "You boys are both doing good with that baby. Better than I would."

Yeah, well, that wasn't saying much.

"Besides, Bo don't look too worried about it. You should take a leaf out of his book. Relax and enjoy yourself a little bit, dance." That was unlikely.

As if he knew he was being talked about, Bo had quit dancing and was ambling his sweaty way toward the table. "Hi, Cooter," he said with a wide smile.

"You want your seat back?" their friend asked him. "Or we can pull up another chair."

"No thanks," Bo countered. "Hey, Luke, you figure it's safe for us to head home now?"

Luke laughed. He had marked time by the number of sips from his mug, Bo marked it by the number of girls he'd danced with. By both of their reckoning, they'd left the baby alone with their kin long enough.

"See you around, Cooter," he said, leaving two dollars on the table to pay for his half-drunk ginger ale.

* * *

_**Most times when days follow after nights spent at the Boar's Nest, them boys is slow-moving and red-eyed. Of course, they've been both of them things most days since that morning they found that wriggling little noisemaker on their porch, but Bo there looks pretty good today. Fresh-faced and not even squinting into the bright summer sun. I reckon their Uncle Jesse might get to sending them off to the Boar's Nest more often, now that he knows they can behave themselves.**_

He could feel the burn of Luke's eyes on his back. Or maybe that was just the sun, but he figured Luke had to be watching this from the other side of the kitchen door.

Beth Ellen Duvall had walked right up onto their porch, brazen as anything, and knocked. Jutted her backside out a bit against the cloth of her short and shiny black skirt, smiled like she could pull off young and innocent in less clothes than most women wore swimming, and asked for him. It was a good thing he was in the kitchen when it happened, otherwise Jesse might well have invited her in. It was the neighborly thing to do, even if it was early Friday afternoon on a farmhouse porch and the girl was dressed like Saturday night in some Atlanta night club. Bo had gotten up from the table to come to the door on the pretext of keeping Bloke from waking up out of his nap. Luke had stayed sitting right where he was and smirked at him when he'd taken a moment to tell Jesse that he'd meet with his guest out on the porch.

Bo couldn't blame his cousin for that, for the assumptions he was making and the way that Jesse had to be frowning about it all. The porch was the scene of some of his better conquests, but those had been in the dark, after his uncle had been asleep or at least in his room. The illusion of privacy had been there, unlike now, when he was quite sure Luke was peeking out through the patterns of lace over the window. At least Daisy had gone off to work already; otherwise she would have been shoving the curtains completely out of her way to get a better look.

"I sure had a nice time dancing with you last night," Beth Ellen was saying. Funny thing was, she wasn't looking at him. Not much, maybe she'd met his eyes here and there, but mostly she seemed to be staring at the door he'd just come out of. Which was where he figured Luke was, but he knew she wasn't looking for his cousin. Luke had never been her type. Neither had Bo, really. She wasn't a farm girl – the strappy shoes with narrow heels that made her wobble against the uneven boards of the porch went to prove that. She'd been the type to want the Dan Jenningses or even Hughie Hoggs of the world. A boy with soft hands and head to match, and maybe a chunk of money to inherit someday. Nope, it wasn't Luke she was after, and it wasn't Bo, either.

He'd known it last night in the Boar's Nest, maybe. Hadn't thought it all the way through, but he'd gotten partway there. Thinking that Beth Ellen hadn't given him a second look all those years they'd been following each other through school. Even when he'd played three sports and been prom king, she hadn't wanted anything to do with him, and then last night suddenly she was dancing with him. More than that, cuddling right up to him like he was something really special.

But he wasn't any different now than he had been then. Except that now he had a baby back in the house, and that's what Beth Ellen was trying to get a peek at through the glass in the door. Bo reckoned she ought to get shocked by a pair of fully adult, bright blue eyes staring back out at her, but if she did, she kept it to herself.

"Dancing was fun," he agreed. Because there was no reason to be rude to her, even if she'd spent all of puberty being rotten to him. "And maybe the next time I get out, we can do it again."

That elicited a pout, fingers of her right hand reaching out for his yellow shirt, hanging loose over his tee shirt. Red nail polish to match the low-necked blouse she was wearing and really, she'd spent some time preparing herself for this. Her hair was up in one of those fancy braids, with just the tiniest wisps curling down by her cheeks. All that fuss over making herself pretty left him wondering why she had waited until last night to make her move. She could have come here any time over the past month and a half and done exactly this same thing.

(Then again, he'd done everything he could to occupy himself last night, to keep himself so busy moving around that he had no time to think about whether poor little Bloke was feeling all the way better after that tooth came through, and how many times Daisy had kissed him in that wet way she had. He'd jumped into dancing with a passion that must have looked to Beth Ellen like it was something other than it was.)

"I was thinking we could go for a picnic, maybe tomorrow afternoon? And then maybe for a ride in the General Lee," She explained, her fingers walking up his shirt and getting dangerously close to his face.

"Beth Ellen," he started, tried to back away. But she had a grip on his shirt and her hands were stronger than any town girl's had a right to be. "I can't exactly—" funny how she moved closer with those words, how she just about tucked herself into his shirt with him. (And Luke, if he really was watching, had to be laughing himself just about sick at how well Bo was handling this girl.) "Just go out all day like that. Not when I got a baby to look after."

She shrugged. Funny how the movement traveled down her body until she was rubbing against him ever so slightly. "Luke'll take care of him." This was the problem with Hazzard. Everyone knew playboy Bo and his responsible cousin Luke far too well. "Or we could take him with us. Ooh, wouldn't that be fun? We could have a little picnic with him."

And that, right there, went to prove how ready to get involved with him and little Bloke she wasn't. Poor girl probably figured Bloke would be as obedient as one of those creepy dolls that girls used to carry around the playground, the ones with eyes that closed when you laid them down, then opened up again when you picked them up.

"Beth Ellen," he tried again to pull himself away from her, but she just came right along with the movement. "I figure maybe you like babies."

"And their daddies," she agreed, and Bo was sorely tempted to announce that Bloke was Luke's. Just to see if Beth Ellen would go running off to his cousin, but he couldn't. Not when he'd mostly come to hope the kid was his, after all.

"Well, then," he said, his hand coming up to grip her wrist. Not hard, but firmly enough to make clear he wanted her to let go of his shirt now. "I figure the best thing you can do right now is to go on back to your little car there," which was a Ford Pinto painted about the same color as toothpaste, and that just went to further prove that she and Bo were incompatible, "and go off and meet yourself a nice boy."

"I'm already with a nice boy," she complained.

"Well, sure, I'm nice," of course he was. He'd been raised properly, knew his manners, and wasn't the same kind of thoughtless jerk that his older cousin could be. "But you want to find someone who ain't already got a baby to care for. Someone you can have all the time you need with, someone who ain't going to be turning away from you to look after a kid that ain't even yours."

"You wouldn't do that to me," she said, looking up at him like some sort of little girl herself. "Would you?"

Yes, he absolutely would. The kid was a Duke and Dukes came first, always.

"You can't turn your back on a baby, no matter how much you like the company you're with." He was trying to let her down easy. She wasn't helping him a whole lot with that effort. "Listen, a baby is something you should want to have when you're ready."

"I'm ready." No, she wasn't.

"And when your husband is ready," he added. "Caring for a kid—well, you'd better love the person you're doing it with, trust me on that. It's a challenge, and there ain't no breaks from it, neither." He sounded so much like Jesse, he was scaring himself. And probably Luke, too, if his cousin was eavesdropping as well as watching. "Now go on, Beth Ellen. I got to get back inside and take care of the baby."

"You're the same brat you ever was, Bo Duke," the girl said, scraping up whatever dignity she could find from where it had fallen to the floorboards. "I wouldn't go for a picnic with you if you was the last man alive."

She flounced down the porch steps as quickly as her skirt would let her and he smiled and waved when she looked back over her shoulder at him. Figured her day wouldn't be all bad; at least she'd gotten a chance to look at his pretty face before she left.

_**Ain't old Bo a sweetheart?**_


	10. Week Eight: Tending and Tending

_**Author's Note:** Another couple of quick canon references here: _Mary Kaye's Baby_ and _Carnival of Thrills_. _

_Thanks for coming along on another ride with me through Hazzard, even if this involves a lot less actual riding than my usual._

* * *

**Week Eight: Tending... and Tending  
**

_June 20-26, 1982_

_**Well. It ain't often you see the Dukes all crowded up in the living room come dawn, faces about as grim and serious as George Washington's on the dollar bill. Them boys ought to be in the barn doing chores and hurling insults at each other, and Daisy's usually in the kitchen starting on breakfast by now, with Jesse indulging in his first cup of coffee for the day. And that baby, the one they're all hovering around now as if he was the engine of the most souped-up car they've ever seen, he'd probably be strapped to Luke or else sleeping in his cradle in the boys' room. But ain't none of them where they're supposed to be.**_

"It ain't another tooth," Jesse proclaimed with the practiced wisdom of an old man.

"How do you know?" Luke asked him because it was another too-bright sunrise after another night of hardly sleeping. Not that the baby had been hollering this time, more like whining in between fitful bouts of sleep. Quietly miserable, and although until now it would have seemed impossible, that was worse than his loud complaining had ever been. More worrisome, and maybe Luke could understand now why his Aunt Lavinia used to complain so much. Bo, she said, at least used to let her know when he was sick or hurt, so she could take care of him. Luke tried to keep it to himself and all she could ever do about him was worry. Still, the kid had a bunch more teeth to go and it would make sense if this was another one coming in.

"Because his nose wasn't running when he cut that tooth. And none of your noses run, neither, when you was teething." And this kid's nose hadn't quit running since he woke up fussy only an hour after having put down for the night.

A tiny, rough cough interrupted the old man's explanation. Daisy – who had been fidgeting ever since she got up that morning to find both of her cousins on the couch, Bo with the baby in his arms and Luke next to him quietly singing _Take it Easy_ to make the baby sleep, keep Bo calm and just maybe make himself relax, too – took three quick steps up to Bo, hands out like she meant to take the baby from him. Must have figured out that it would have turned into an ugly tug of war, and stopped short of actually grabbing the baby. Just stroked her skinny fingers over the fine fuzz on his head.

"Uncle Jesse," she complained. "He's warm. We got to take him to Doc Appleby, or maybe Tri-County."

This was the part where Bo ought to chime in with some manner of complaint about how Daisy didn't know what she was talking about and would do better to mind her own business. It was what he'd always done when their girl cousin made any assertion at all, and that impulse had only gotten stronger since Bo had gotten serious about raising the baby. But he didn't, he just looked up at Jesse with those same miserable eyes that had gotten him out of more whippings than any of them could count.

"Now, Daisy, Bo, Luke, I know you're worried, but I reckon he's got a cold and babies get colds. It's one of them things they do better than most."

"But Uncle Jesse," Daisy argued. "He's _warm_." As if she hadn't said it loudly enough last time.

"I know he is," their uncle wheedled back at her. After all, he had felt the baby's face for fever already, when he'd come out of his bedroom to find his boys huddled up on the couch. Still, the oldster reached out again to get himself another feel. "But he ain't that warm and he ain't that little, neither. Lavinia used to say, 'Two months old, run them straight to the doc. Three months or more, give them one time round the clock.'"

Lavinia. Maybe Luke had missed her a little bit every day since she was gone, maybe he'd thought of her on birthdays and holidays, but he'd never wanted her back here as much as he did right now. Jesse was okay with illness – he handled it like he did everything else, with a firm, well-meaning hand. But Lavinia was a genius when it came to one of them being sick. She could mix herbs and barks and broth up into medicines that—

Of course she could, because she'd had to.

"I reckon Uncle Jesse's right," he told his cousins, both of whom stood ready to dispute the old man's wisdom. But they weren't thinking yet, about all the things this kid would need, all the trouble he was likely to get himself into and bones he'd break, because he was a Duke. And if money was scarce when he and his cousins were little, it was downright lacking these days. The kid was sick, sure, but his color was good and between those little coughs and sneezes, he was breathing all right. They'd watch him carefully and if he got worse, well, Doc was just a fifteen minute car ride away – ten if Bo was motivated. But odds were he'd get better and they could save up what little money they had for sometime when his condition was a lot more serious.

Bo looked at him, those fuzzy eyebrows knitted together in worry, but he was trusting. Always had been, especially where Luke was concerned, so he relented.

"Well, I'm going to call out sick from work," Daisy decided, "in case Bloke or y'all need me."

"No, Daisy," Luke protested, because after all, she was the only one with a steady paycheck, and if they did end up visiting the doc, they were going to need her help in paying for it. (Or offer a chicken in trade, but Doc Appleby wasn't as forgiving as Doc Petticord had been in that regard.)

His girl cousin flounced out into the kitchen and toward the phone anyway, completely ignoring him.

"I'll deal with her," Jesse offered, raising a staying hand against Luke's effort to stand up. "You boys just stay there and I'll be back in a few minutes after I've talked Daisy into mixing up some of Lavinia's cinnamon rub recipe. And," he added, before Luke could protest, "going to work her normal shift. Don't worry, ain't no one at the Boar's Nest this early in the morning for her to call anyways. I got time to talk to her." Their uncle started to follow off after where Daisy led, then turned back and looked over his shoulder. "How long you boys been sitting there?"

Luke shrugged and Bo mumbled, "A long time."

"Well," their uncle informed them, wide finger taking a moment to point at each of them in turn. "I'll get the eggs and give the critters their morning feeding. The rest of the chores can wait a bit. But breakfast will be ready in a half hour. I expect you both to be there, and I expect you clean and dressed." And not, he didn't bother to add, looking as miserable as two pups caught in a cold downpour.

"Yes, sir," Bo said, and Luke nodded his head because it was generally assumed that whatever Bo said he agreed with unless he didn't. Jesse pointed for a second longer, in case either of them got into their heads to think he wasn't serious about what he'd said. The baby let out a tiny sneeze followed by a quiet whine, and that seemed to be enough answer for all of them. They'd be there, but they wouldn't necessarily be happy about it.

"Luke," Bo started when Jesse's rumbling voice started up in the kitchen, telling Daisy things she didn't want to hear. "You really figure not taking him to the doc is a good idea?" It was cute how Bo stared down into the baby's face. It was less cute that the baby was in desperate need of a tissue. Luke used the hem of the tee shirt he'd worn to bed, instead. It was doomed to the laundry pile in a few minutes anyway.

"Jesse seems to think it is," Luke said back, because he had no idea, not on his own. Daisy could have been as right as any of the rest of them, and he had no way of knowing. But Bo worrying on top of Luke's worrying wouldn't get them anywhere. "He's done his share of raising babies." Even if he'd never let his kids call him Dad, and never let them give him presents for Father's Day, either. Which was likely to become a family tradition, considering that he and Bo seemed to have made a tacit decision to ignore the day altogether. "You wasn't easy, you know."

"Bet I was easier than you," Bo said, because it was habit. Pick on each other and forget the dire consequences of whatever fool thing they were set to do. Except it wasn't working any better this time than it had any other time. They both knew they had no idea how to raise a child, and that they'd never have half the skill their uncle did. "I miss Lavinia." Or that their aunt had.

"Yeah, well, if she was here we'd both have to take showers before breakfast, too. I reckon Jesse will let us get away with fresh clothes, clean hands and combed hair." And really, the hair was probably optional, but Bo always felt better when his hair was fluffed within an inch of its life, falling in pretty waves around his face. "Go on, you get ready first. I'll take him," Luke shooed.

The baby got transferred into his arms and Bo went off to get ready, leaving Luke to think about sickness and money and wondering how the Dukes had always managed to balance the two before.

* * *

It was hot in that way that felt like being baked in one of Daisy's pies, even if it was almost sunset and the air should have been cooling by now. Outside, where any breeze that happened by was weaker than that old fan they kept in the living room, and that was just ridiculous.

"Come on, Bo," Luke was saying, even if he was only a half a step ahead. An echo of when they were kids and Luke would tell him to keep up or stay behind, because he didn't have patience then. Sometimes he'd go marching off when Bo was busy playing with his cars or doing his homework, and there'd be tears. Anger and frustration that Luke wouldn't just wait a minute for him and Jesse would say he should calm down, that Luke would be back and when he was it'd be fine. It'd be good, because Luke would have missed him while he was gone, and he'd be glad to see him again. He couldn't swear it worked out exactly that way, but he was just a kid then. By now he'd figured out that sometimes Luke needed space, but that he'd be back and searching for Bo as soon as he was ready to have fun again.

But that wasn't what this was, two little boys who never had anyone but each other to play with until they got old enough to ride their bikes a few miles down the road. This was work waiting for them in the fields, and Luke's usual impatience to get it done. Or maybe above average impatience, but there was no point. They were going to be out for a number of hours and it was going to be messy.

"He was feeling better," Bo reminded him. "He's probably asleep by now."

The worst of Bloke's illness seemed to have passed in the first twenty-four hours. Not that his nose was clear or that he wasn't still fussy, but the temperature he'd had that first day hadn't stayed around and Bo had to admit Jesse was right. It was just a cold, even if listening to that little cough was enough to break a grown man's heart.

"I ain't worried about the kid." Of course he wasn't. The unflappable Luke Duke never worried about anything. Except that Bo knew better, had sat next to him enough times when his plans had gone wrong, and nerves and guilt had dug into him like ticks on a hound. "I just want to get this done."

"So you can get back there and make sure Bloke's all right."

Luke looked over his shoulder at him, offered a smirk that admitted nothing at all, but he slowed his pace just a little. Made what they were doing into more of a walk than a forced march.

The rains had stayed away for more than a month now, and what had been good for the first haying of summer was threatening to desiccate the corn crop. They were somewhere on the ragged edge of needing to harvest early or give up on harvesting at all, but as long as there was still water in the pond, they were trying to irrigate. To share it around to as many plants as they could and that meant moving their meager soaker pipes from here to there at dusk so the ground could absorb as much moisture as possible overnight when temperatures were supposed to be cooler. He and Luke hadn't been out here in two days, thanks to everyone's worry about Bloke, but they couldn't justify putting it off any longer.

They headed to the pond first, checking the water line while there was still light enough to see. It didn't look good, and Luke stood there with one hand on his hip, like if he glowered at the situation long enough, maybe it'd improve.

Normally there'd be three of them out here, and Jesse would be moving them away from the pond by now, putting them to work. But at lunch this afternoon, they all decided it was best if someone stayed behind with Bloke instead of bringing him out with them, snuggled close to Luke's body in his blanket-sling. Daisy offered to take the night off from work, but that was foolish. Her earnings were insurance against a failed crop, which was in turn insurance against future needs for the baby. What was that amount Mary Kaye Porter had said it would take to raise a baby until he was eighteen? More than a hundred thousand dollars. The Dukes hadn't earned that much over the course of seven generations.

Bo stood next to his cousin, resting an arm across his shoulders. It was nice, the way their heights had worked out after all those years of growing at awkward angles to one another. Now Luke was just short enough to make the perfect leaning post.

"That baby needs a mother," he blurted when what he'd intended to say was that they needed to get to work.

Luke turned his head, tipping it back to see him better. "He's got Daisy, if you'd stop saying she's spoiling him and let her mother him now and then."

_**Sure, Luke says that to Bo. But we ain't exactly seen him clamoring to give over his caretaking chores to Daisy, have we? Them boys is two peas from the same pod.**_

"She does spoil him." And half the time she treated him like girl baby, too. "Besides, it ain't that. Daisy ain't never going to be more than his aunt. He needs a mother."

"I don't figure his mother wants to be found. You don't disappear and not even come back to check on your kid in almost two months if you want him. Come on." He stepped out from under Bo's arm, and started walking the length of the main pipe. Up ahead there would be a handle they'd turn to open up the flow of water. The pipe would split then split again into a series of thinner, porous pipes that let the moisture out in drips at a time. Moving them wasn't easy, they were heavy and sometimes muddy, always wet – though that last part might just be a relief tonight. They took of their shirts anyway, hanging them on tree branches as they passed, and moved out into the fields.

* * *

Luke was pointing out over the dessicated crop, explaining strategy and the sequence for doing what they needed to with the least amount of work, and Bo wasn't listening to a word he said.

"He needs a mother." This apparently, was the most important topic of discussion. Right now, as the sun was kissing the horizon and the work was staring them in the face.

"I reckon you should have married Beth Ellen, then," Luke countered, and walked off between the two rows from which they needed to move the first section of pipe. Leading by example because sometimes that worked where words failed. Bo might not listen but he'd follow on Luke's heels like a puppy all the same.

"No," came the answer from right behind him, proving that Bo was as predictable as ever. Leave it to his cousin to insist on an impossible conversation when they had work to do. "She wasn't good enough. She'd lose interest in no time. She ain't got no patience." True enough, she'd never tolerated any of Bo's advances back in their younger days. "Besides, she's too loud and quick and I don't figure she'd be nothing like Aunt Lavinia was."

"Here, help me with this," Luke directed, bending over to unscrew one section of pipe from the rest of the length. Once they broke the pipes down a little, they'd be able to move the main section of it, then it would just be a matter of reassembly in its new location. Lather, rinse, repeat about a dozen times and they might get done by midnight. "Aunt Lavinia was in her forties when we moved in here, Bo." Or maybe two in the morning, given that his cousin seemed awfully inclined to let him do all the work. Maybe Bo figured that his unmoving feet were generously holding the ground still to make Luke's task easier. "I don't reckon no girl your age is going to seem a whole lot like you remember Aunt Lavinia being. And I don't figure Jesse's going to ever get married again."

"I reckon," Bo agreed, still managing a fine job of doing nothing at all. Luke handed him the length of pipe he'd just unscrewed and Bo just tipped it up on its end and used it as a leaning stick. Oh, it was going to be a long night. "But I wasn't thinking of Jesse, anyway."

"And you wasn't thinking of you. Here." He handed off another length of pipe. Now Bo had two leaning sticks.

And a shrug, probably a smirk, but it was hard to see around the way his hair and bare shoulders were glowing in backlit orange. "I ain't never dated an older woman," he explained. "Not that much older."

"Oh, and I have," Luke answered him, all snideness and sarcasm. A tone he'd've used a few years back when he and Bo used to argue more. Before Diane and her carnival, before arguments got dangerous and scary and nearly drove Bo away from the family. His cousin did leave for a couple of days, but fortunately sense returned to them both, and they'd been a little more careful with their words ever since. "Are you going to help me here or what?"

"I am helping you, Luke." Oh, and there was a grin in those words. The brat was proud of himself, like he'd solved the all the world's problems. The baby needed a mother and Luke needed a wife. "Heck, you ain't dated nobody in a long time."

That was relative. For Bo, thirty minutes without a girl under his arm counted as a long time. "So you're just being selfless, then. Giving me dibs on the next unmarried forty-year-old woman who comes through Hazzard," Luke clarified.

"That's what cousins are for," Bo pointed out.

_**Ain't that boy sweet?**_

"Yeah, well, cousins are also for doing their share of the work. Take them pipes down to that last row." Or anyplace else far from where Luke was working the next section of pipe loose. He would follow along to where Bo led when he got good and ready. Or when Bo forgot his ridiculous notions of how he was going to be such a big help when it came to Luke's love life.

"That baby needs a mother," Bo's voice floated out over the rows of corn stalks, drowning out the way his feet crunched over dried leaves as he walked away.


	11. Week Nine: Bad Things Come in Threes

_**Author's Note:** Yep, I'm late and off-schedule. Work's been so busy that I haven't even had time for that last edit before posting. Then again, a little insomnia always does give one time to catch up on one's errands..._

* * *

**Week Nine: Bad Things Come in Threes (or Sevens)  
**

_June 27 – July 3, 1982_

_**Well, I'll be. If the foxes ain't trying to raid the henhouse again… you'd figure they'd quit after their paws got caught in a few traps, wouldn't you? But here they come, limping right on back, like greedy, senseless fools. And right in the middle of the Dukes' evening meal, too.  
**_

"Well, hello there, Rosco, Cletus, J.D.," Jesse said with that chilled politeness that must have sounded like a genuine invitation all the same. "J.D., put out that cigar or go out on the porch. No smoking in this house," he scolded like it was a rule the commissioner should have known. (And maybe it was; Bo couldn't remember any cigars or cigarettes in the house when he and Luke and Daisy were children.) Boss grumbled and went back outside the kitchen door he'd just entered through, to dispose of his stinky nuisance. "Would you care to join us for some victuals?" Rosco looked at what little food there was on the Dukes' kitchen table, the baked beans with the meager chunks of ham cooked in, the tomatoes from the garden and corn from another farm's early crop, and most of it gone already. And not all into Bo's stomach, despite what Luke would insist. Cooter had done his share of decimating the meal, too, but he was an invited guest. And he'd make up for what he'd eaten in a single doughnut-and-beer breakfast, if the Duke boys ever could figure out a way to get to the garage on a Saturday morning, around feedings and diaper changes.

But this was Monday evening, the late-June sun still high and golden through the leaves of the farmyard trees, with Daisy off from work, Bo and Luke relatively rested, Jesse telling tales and Cooter visiting because it was the only chance he ever got to see his favorite member of the Duke family, the General Lee. Even Bloke was peaceful in his bassinet, over his cold and playing with an old leather hatband that Luke had found in their closet and given to him. It was a slobbery mess, but he was chirping up all kinds of happy noises about it.

"Maybe just a little," Rosco said, crowding around the already filled-to-capacity table and reaching for the last corncob with greedy fingers.

"Dat, Rosco," Boss intervened, the screen door slapping closed behind him as he returned. "We ain't here to eat."

"We ain't?"

The sound of the cars approaching had been all it took for Cooter to advise them of who was coming. He knew the exact pitch and rhythm of every engine that had ever driven into his shop and he'd hissed furious warnings in plenty of time for two Duke boys to hop out a back window and run to the tree line and beyond.

However, three Duke boys, four spare diapers, two blankets, baby powder, an extra onesie, three bottles of formula and a car carrier would have taken fifteen minutes and a double-wide window to escape. On a good day, when most of the supplies were washed, dried and laid out in tidy piles. Tonight they would have been lucky to get out before the clock ticked over to tomorrow.

So when the banging on the door had set up, Daisy had been dispatched to welcome the town fools with a smile. She hadn't ever made it back to her seat, had gotten herself trapped by the stove, where she stirred a pot of lukewarm water leftover from cooking the corn, and otherwise just watched the scene unfold. If negotiations with the law went awry, she'd put those big, batting eyes of hers – along with that otherwise useless pot of water – to good use.

"We ain't," Boss assured Rosco, though those beady brown eyes were eying the leftover morsels with every bit as much greed as his sheriff's were.

Cletus had wandered the few steps that were possible, around chairs and long legs and Cooter's lazy slouch. Away from his handlers and over to Luke's side of the table. Presently, he was sticking out his tongue, blue from one of those lollipops that Miz Tisdale kept in the post office, toward the bassinet. No telling if he was getting any response.

"Oh," Rosco said, his face melting into a sad little lump of a frown. Then it lifted with just that last little bit of hope. "Maybe," he said, the hand that had been reaching for the corn turning itself into a claw, fingers just a fraction of an inch from his thumb, "just a little, just the tiniest of nibbles."

"No!" Boss insisted, even as his own gaze fixed itself on the cluster of beans still at the bottom of the serving bowl. Hardly enough to feed a mouse, and there was a big, white rat giving it some serious consideration. Then, using whatever small amount of willpower he had to get control of himself, Boss added, "We're here after that b-a-b-y."

Daisy dropped the spoon onto the stove and got herself a good grip on the handles of the pot.

"The what?" Jesse asked. Just for clarification. To be helpful, undoubtedly, because Rosco looked confused, and no one was sure whether he could spell.

"B-a-b—" Boss started all conspiratorially, then realized who he was talking to.

"Oh, the baby?" Luke added in; again, just translating for the slow-witted. "You mean him?" His thumb jerked in the general direction of the bassinet.

"No, not Cletus, the baby!" Rosco explained and that sure was obliging of him to shout it out, so no one would be confused anymore.

"The baby," Boss Hogg simpered, "that you all stole."

There was a lot of noise right then: Daisy calling Boss a liar, Cooter asking what exactly Boss thought he was up to this time, Rosco letting out his ijits and wijits and Bo's chair scraping on the floor as he stood up. Towering over all of them and ready to fight, even if Jesse was hollering for everyone to calm down.

And then there was Luke, announcing quiet as anything. "Oh, you came for the baby? All right, what don't you just take him then?"

Cletus' blue tongue stopped right where it was, half out of his mouth as he looked at Luke in dumb fascination.

_**You know, Cletus ain't known for his smarts, but just this once, I'm on his side of this thing. What Luke just said don't make a lick of sense to me, neither.**_

"Luke," Daisy complained, turning to face him. The pot came with her, held in both her hands while she tried to decide who to throw it at or hit over the head with it. Bo stared his oldest cousin down, but Luke just sat there with a curious tilt to his head. So he turned to their uncle next, wanting him to say something, to stop what was about to happen, and found those faded blue eyes fixed on Luke in rapt fascination. Recognition of a plan, and the old man cleared his throat quietly.

And Bloke screamed. Too much noise or too many people, maybe his bassinet got jostled or then again he might just be scared of the blue tongue that kept sticking out at him. Whatever it was, the kid was done being placid.

"He's all yours, Boss," Luke offered cheerfully. "Of course, you're going to want all his diapers too," pointing off toward their bedroom where there was a jumble of diapers in various stages of being folded, "and his wipes – sounds like he needs a change now – and his clothes, which are pretty much everywhere because when you've got a baby in the house you ain't got time to clean. Oh, and you're going to need to feed him—"

Daisy had put the pot back down on the stove and stood there now with one hand on her hip and the other over her mouth, her eyebrows up and eyes bright with amusement. Cooter was still somewhere between confusion and catching on, Jesse looked entirely innocent and Boss was getting a bit pale and pasty, the triangle of gray fuzz that hung off his head damp with sweat.

"Oh, yeah," Bo jumped in. "You'll need all his bottles and lots of formula. Plus this," he said, lifting the towel that had been hanging on the back of his chair and offering it to Rosco.

"Th—this," Rosco echoed, taking the cloth.

"It's his burping cloth," Bo explained.

"Burping—" Rosco was doing his best to follow along.

"Yeah, you put it over your shoulder," Luke explained. "To protect your clothes. In case when you're burping him, he—"

"Luke," Jesse warned, because unwanted, halfway hostile visitors or not, this was still his kitchen, still the dinner table and there were certain things you didn't say when there was food on the table.

Luke shrugged, cupped his hand over his mouth, puffed his cheeks, then pulled the hand away. Opening it wide to mime the insides coming out in a rush, and Rosco dropped the cloth with urgent distaste.

"Gij!" seemed to cover Rosco's thoughts on that matter. "You mean—"

"Oh, yeah," Jesse assured him. "He does," he mimicked Luke's gesture, "a lot Rosco. He's a baby. They don't know no better. Unlike adults," and the oldster's eyes rolled over to look at Boss, whose face was getting close to matching the white of his jacket. "Who spout off when really they ought to be minding their own business."

"Business," Rosco echoed. "I'll tell you my business, I'm the sheriff around here and my business is to confiscate that—" Bloke screamed again, making even Cletus stumble back a step. "—there baby."

"Sure," Luke said again, leaning forward to slide one supporting hand under Bloke's little body. Lifting him up and halfway offering him, wet, red face, tiny clenched fists and all, to whichever lawman would take him. "But I reckon you're going to want to change him before you put him in your car." Luke wrinkled his nose.

Bo nodded in agreement. "Yeah, once you get that smell in your car, there ain't no amount of driving around with your windows open that will clear it up."

"Clear it," Rosco said, hand going up to pinch his nose shut. Which was silly, the smell was entirely theoretical. "Up."

"Yeah," Luke said with a shrug. "But changing him ain't so bad, not once you figure out how to keep everything under control."

_**I reckon old Bo and Luke ain't forgot their early lessons when it comes to diaper changing. **_

"Luke," Jesse was scolding again about subjects that did not get discussed at the dinner table, but the conversation was pretty much over. By this time, Luke was getting to his feet, taking a step toward Rosco and Boss.

"Go on," Luke coaxed, another step forward for him, another backwards toward the door for the sheriff and commissioner. Cletus was getting left behind, but he didn't even seem to notice as he stared in fascination at the twisted, hollering face of Bloke. Who was not happy about anything at all and even if he didn't smell, there was no way Rosco or Boss would be able to tolerate the sound of a full-out temper tantrum long enough to even get onto Old Mill Road, much less take him all the way to town. "Ain't you gonna take him, Rosco?"

"Ij," the sheriff explained. "Oo-oo."

"Dat, Rosco," Boss scolded. "Just leave it. Just leave that baby here. But don't think you've pulled the wool over anyone's eyes, Luke Duke." Luke shrugged his perfect innocence and pulled the little one close to his chest, comforting his cries with a wide hand patting that tiny back. "We know you stole that baby, and you're going to jail for it. And your cousin, too." A nicotine stained finger, looking all the fatter for the cigar that it wasn't holding, pointed at Bo.

"Well, that's just fine, J.D.," Jesse said cheerfully. "Just fine. You can do that." The commissioner looked at his one-time friend and now long-time rival as though he'd lost his mind. "One you get yourself a nice little warrant. Until then, I'd be just as pleased as punch if you'd stay off my land."

Boss huffed, Rosco mumbled something that might have been a Martian curse for all Bo could understand it, and Cletus tripped over a chair leg in his effort to be a dutiful deputy and follow after his bosses.

"I'll be back," Boss promised, and then they were gone.

_**Phew. Except I really don't like the sound of them last words.**_

* * *

"Seems to me," Jesse had said as soon as the bumbling fools that claimed to be in charge of the county had driven off the Duke property. "That we'd best consult a lawyer and find out exactly what our rights are."

There were murmurs of agreement all around, but it was already too late in the afternoon to do anything right then, so Daisy had started the dishes, Bo had taken Cooter outside to spend some quality time with the General, and Jesse had taken the baby from Luke's arms. "I got him. You go out there with them other boys."

Luke'd done as he was told and even if it had only been a few minutes before he and Bo were waving goodbye to the hook on the back of Cooter's truck as it bumped along the dirt lane, it had been nice. Standing in the pink light of sunset, staring into the engine compartment of a car, telling lies and truths and promising each other impossibilities of future races and chases and a party to celebrate any wins that came their way.

Then they'd gone back inside to take the still-fussing baby back from Jesse, because he was their responsibility after all. And because just maybe gumming Bo's finger would soothe those tears away.

But Tuesday morning went to prove that the cold was coming around for a second shot at the poor kid. They talked about Doc Appleby again, but decided there wasn't much a doctor could do that a little rest and some steam wouldn't help, so they turned on the shower and all four adults crowded into the tiny bathroom to watch the kid's breath ease and his eyes close. Daisy went to work, and none of the rest of them left the farm. By nightfall, all the Duke men and boys were exhausted and went to bed early, leaving the kitchen light on for Daisy.

Wednesday morning started with a loudly ringing telephone before sunup, slowly shuffling feet and quiet grumbles from Jesse about how he was coming and a few other choice words asking what kind of fool would get between a man and his sleep. Luke rubbed his eyes and squinted into the filmy gray of predawn to see both cousin and baby still soundly asleep (that was Bo's son, all right, except for those moments when he seemed like Luke's) so he left them where they were. Got out of bed and slipped through the door before either of them so much as twitched or rolled over, and met Uncle Jesse in the kitchen.

"That was Buck Crawford," the oldster said. "He's got a breech."

Which meant that Jesse needed to hurry to get dressed and down the road a few miles to the Crawford farm, to help with the birthing of a calf that didn't know forward from backward. Wasting time wasn't an option, when both the heifer's and the calf's lives were hinged on Jesse's expertise.

"I'll make you a thermos of coffee," Luke offered. The old man nodded his thanks and went off to his bedroom.

For being such a pick-me-up, coffee was a lazy concoction, taking its time brewing. Jesse was dressed and carrying his work boots into the kitchen before it was ready. His uncle settled into his usual chair and bent over to pull the first boot on, grunting as he worked on tying it.

"I figured we'd go to town today," his uncle said as he finished up with the first shoe and grabbed the second by its tongue. "And see if we couldn't meet with that new lawyer that moved into Kevin Mansfield's old office."

"All right," Luke said and decided that the coffee might be weak, but it had brewed as long as he could afford to let it. He reached up into the cabinet over his head and found a thermos. Finished transferring the hot brew just about the same time Jesse got his second shoe tied. "When you get home, we'll do that." He handed off the thermos.

"Thank you, Luke. See you around noon, I reckon," the old man said.

But they didn't see him for another twelve hours. "It was twins," Jesse explained as he settled his exhausted frame onto the porch swing. "They both survived." But the heifer hadn't, and without her it was hard to say what would happen to her babies.

"We'll go see the lawyer tomorrow," Luke offered. It was already too late by then to see him that night and anyway, Jesse was just about half asleep. He didn't even offer a head bob in response.

On Thursday, Maudine's green jealousy over how little attention she'd been paid that summer revealed itself in a bout of colic. The four adults took turns walking her in circles around the paddock, in the thick humidity under threatening clouds, Bo with the baby's blanket-sling tied around him. It was an awkward fit – his body was too long, so either the baby had to be up near his neck or they had to tie the barest ends of the sling together and hope it held. Luke offered to switch, since the sling fit him better anyway, but Bo insisted he was fine. Until the diaper got soiled, and then, quite suddenly, it was Luke's turn to take care of the kid.

Which was just as well, since he'd been outside long enough, Luke reckoned, for a baby who had been sick. So he took the little one inside, changed him, fed him, changed him again (because sometimes it just worked out that way) and put him into the car seat he was rapidly outgrowing for a nap. The baby stayed on the porch for the rest of the day, one or another of the family sitting with him while everyone else fussed over Maudine. By the time the mule had gotten enough attention for one day, it was time for Daisy to head off for the evening shift at the Boar's Nest and the rest of them still had a bunch of chores to do.

Tomorrow, they all promised themselves, they would meet with the lawyer.

But the storm that never quite happened all day wailed in the night. Daisy called to say she was going to stay with her fiend Sally Jo in town, rather than make her way home through the driving rain. The three Duke men said their goodnights and wandered off to their own corners of the house, but there wasn't a lot of sleep to be had. Not by the adults, anyway, when it sounded like the word was blowing apart around them. The baby slept through the night for what might have been the first time in his little life. Must have known that it was the right night to give it a try – the one time it wouldn't do his daddies one bit of good.

When the pitch black dawned to a murky, miserable gray, there were oak branches and assorted leaves littering the farmyard, the old shed behind the house had taken on a dangerous list to the left, and the ground, which had been parched, was soaked. The barn and livestock had weathered the storm well, but the fence around Maudine's paddock was in pieces.

About the time that the three of them had returned from morning chores and taking stock of the damage to their property (the corn crop had survived; everything else was trivial) Daisy called to say that she'd crossed paths with Cletus in the boardinghouse hallway. He'd been covered from hair to toenails in mud and had claimed the roads beyond the confines of town were impassable due to thick mudslides.

_**Now just because old Cletus can't figure out a way to drive down a road don't mean it's really impassable, but Uncle Jesse told Daisy to hang tight in town anyway. No point in taking chances on roads that ain't been maintained since Jesse was a mere pup himself.**_

Which meant they'd be reheating yesterday's day old beans for lunch and dinner. And the lawyer would just have to wait until next week.

* * *

Saturday didn't work out any better than the rest of the week had. Dawn was still snoozing when an awful racket of clucks and whinnies and generally upsetting noises set up around the barn. Bo woke up standing on the porch with no memory of how he got there, Luke at his side. Bodies tensed, breath held, ready for a fight, and—

"Come on," Luke hollered, sprinting off toward the barn, barefoot, Bo chasing after him. Jesse's heavily plodding feet were somewhere behind them and then, _blam!_ The varmint gun's blast, splitting the morning air. _Blam!_ again, and _blam!_ one more time.

_**Someone ought to get them boys an alarm clock. Most people hate 'em, but I figure an alarm's got to be more pleasant than all them other ways these boys end up getting woken up.**_

"Dagnabbit!" Jesse had seen it first, the dark shape slinking out toward the tree line, its back down and moving fast. "Coyote in the henhouse." And none of the shots had met their mark.

Fortunately, Daisy had finally made it home the night before, so she was there to cradle little Bloke when the gun's blasts set him to screaming. Which left the menfolk to sort out the ruffled hens, clean up the mess of feathers, and discuss how much wire they really had enough money stored in that cigar box behind the refrigerator to buy.

"If we lose a chicken a night, it ain't going to matter how much money we ain't got," Jesse groused from where he was bent over, studying the gap that the coyote must have wiggled through. It wasn't big and it couldn't have been there long. But the last time they'd rewired the whole coop had been years ago, so it wasn't surprising a weak spot had opened up. It wouldn't be long before the next one came along. "We ain't going to have no eggs, nor no chickens to sell or eat."

So once chores were complete, Bloke changed and fed, breakfast eaten and showers had, he and Luke were dispatched to town to buy as much wire as thirty-seven dollars and twenty-six cents would get them. Bo wanted to take Bloke along for the ride (and to keep him from getting cooed over and otherwise ridiculously pampered by his Aunt Daisy and Grandpa Jesse) but got overruled.

"We ain't gonna want him with us when we're toting wire from the store to the car," Luke informed him. "And you ain't standing off to the side holding no baby and flirting with girls while I do all the work, neither." Which hadn't been his intention at all, but if it had worked out that way, Bo couldn't see why it would have been so all-fired bad.

It was just as well they were empty-handed when they walked into the store to the tune of an overhead jingle and an ongoing dispute over who was going to carry and who was going to open doors and trunk – and ran smack into Cletus Hogg.

_**Almost literally, folks. It's a good thing them two boys is nimble or it would have been a bruising experience.**_

"Well hello, Cletus," Bo said to him, his face smiling and his eyes tracking to the door to scan the street for obstacles. A clear shot to the General if they needed it.

"Hi Bo, Hi Luke," the deputy chirped back; as always, he was genuinely happy to see them. Even if they were both getting looked over fairly carefully. Luke turned his body in parallel of Cletus' efforts, allowing the deputy only a view of his front side. They had nothing to hide, but making the fool lawman crane his neck at awkward angles was fun, so Bo followed his cousin's lead. "Now, you two wouldn't have no baby on you, would you?"

"Baby?" Luke asked, that mask of utter confusion dropping over his features. _Moonshine? Why no, officer, I ain't never once transported no moonshine. Never even heard of the stuff until just now when you asked me about it. _ "Of course we ain't got no baby."

Which, of course, only made Cletus more desperate to check behind their backs or in their pockets or anyplace else he could convince himself that they might be hiding a fifteen pound crying machine.

"Cletus," Bo jumped in when the teasing got tiresome. Because left to himself, Luke could do it all day just to watch him act like an idiot. "We're here to get chicken wire. You don't bring a baby along with you to get chicken wire."

That look from Luke seemed surprised at this revelation, silently reminding Bo that not a half hour back he was fully prepared to bring the baby with them. Yeah, well, that was then.

"Well, all right," Cletus agreed, and he wasn't terribly reluctant about it either. "As long as you ain't brought him here then I don't have to worry about repossessing him for cousin Boss."

"Repossessing him?" That was Luke, caught somewhere between amusement and disgust.

Cletus shrugged. "That's what Boss and Rosco have been calling it."

"How can you repossess something you ain't never had to begin with?" Bo wondered.

"And more importantly, why would you want to?" Luke added.

"Well, I don't know about that," Cletus said with that his jaw dropping loosely in that way it always did when he tried to think. Folded his arms over the powder blue of his uniform shirt and he might have stood there all day like that if Miz Tisdale hadn't poked him from behind. A loud request to be excused on her part, followed by mumblings about how she really didn't want to stand in the store all day and there were three relatively large men blocking her way. They all stepped aside and apologized like they were raised to, and by the time she was gone, Cletus had something to say. "Cousin Boss said something about how you probably kidnapped that baby from some rich folks that would pay a lot for his safe return. So he and Rosco needed to get the baby from you so they could figure out who he belonged to and get a big reward. Rosco was excited because cousin Boss said he could have fifty percent of fifty percent of fifty percent of a whole bunch of other percents of whatever the reward money turned out to be."

_**I reckon we knew that was Boss's plan all along. Still, when Cletus says it like that, it's just plain ridiculous. Ain't a soul in the whole tri-county area that could be called rich. Excepting Boss, and we know that baby ain't his. Heck, if it was, the sky would have cracked open and lightning would have struck because the world sure don't need another little Hogg running around.**_

"Cletus," Bo tried to explain. Went slow, because sometimes the deputy had trouble following. "Either me or Luke is the father." Funny how they'd stopped blaming each other. "And we ain't got no money at all." Other than the savings they were about to spend on chicken wire. "As to the mama," he added with a shrug, "we ain't been able to figure out who she is. I don't suppose Boss and Rosco are going to have any more luck with finding her than we have."

"Still," Luke interrupted. Quietly because they were in a public place and Luke never had liked his business getting spread around like Daisy's black raspberry preserves. "If Boss and Rosco couldn't find the real mama, I suppose there's plenty of rich people in big cities that want babies and ain't never been able to have them." Raised eyebrows to walk Bo straight to the point without having to announce it out loud: the county commissioner might just be perfectly willing to sell their baby to the highest bidder. Some city slicker who could afford to give him all he could ever want in material goods, but couldn't give him half the love that the Dukes could. It would be dirty pool, but Boss never had been known to play clean.

"Uh, thanks for your help, Cletus," Bo said, following after Luke, who had already started to make a beeline for the chicken wire in the back corner of the store. They needed to get that and get home where they could protect Bloke as soon as possible. And they really did need to find a way to hire themselves a lawyer, even if they were poor as a newly shorn sheep.

"Oh, hey, no problem," came from the deputy behind him. "Any time."


	12. Week Ten: Making Plans

**Week Ten: Making Plans  
**

_July 4-10, 1982_

Sunday, and the week had been one disaster after another. Jesse said church was the best cure for a string of bad days and that there was no reason they couldn't all go. The law wouldn't dare touch the baby (_Bloke_ – Luke was going to have to resolve himself to that stupid name; if they were going to manage to convince any judge they deserved this kid they were going to have to say he had a name, no matter how ridiculous) in front of God and the church ladies. Actually, the church ladies were more dangerous – the worst God would do was strike Boss dead with lightning. The church ladies would tear him apart by tiny bits, making sure he suffered all along the way.

Besides, odds were against Boss or Rosco showing up in church at all. They hardly ever did to begin with, but since it was the Fourth of July, they would most likely be out on the square, placing plastic fire hydrants in front of the parking spaces and setting up fold-out concession stands with alarming price lists hung up on the sides.

Bo seemed happy enough to head off to church, especially when they decided that the three Duke boys would take the General. Bloke really was going to need a new car seat within a few weeks, but for now he was still happy enough in what they had and did his chirping thing – when he wasn't blowing bubbles – the whole way into town, which encouraged Bo to believe that the kid would be a racecar driver in a week or two, maybe a month at most.

"He's a Duke," Bo explained as the wind gusted in through the window, messing up the blond thatch he'd so carefully combed into place before they left. "And I figure, we're doing a great job with him. Ain't we?" Luke had no answer for that. Not when all he had was doubts and Bo had glee. "I mean we made it through last week. And just listen to how happy he is. I reckon we're going to be just fine."

Sure, one rough week was the same as eighteen years. Or, well, more like a lifetime since the kid was a Duke and he'd never move out of the farmhouse. Just look at him and Bo. Luke was fairly certain that Jesse would swear up and down that he was still raising them even though the thirties were knocking on the door of his twenties.

"We'll do all right," he said back anyway. Sometimes, he figured, it was best to act confident for Bo's sake.

When they got to church, parking on the street behind Jesse's pickup, Bo carried the baby up the steps, over to their usual pew and set the car seat next to himself. Luke let him do it, even if he figured that Bo was looking to make a hasty escape mid-sermon when the kid (Bloke – he really _did_ need to start using that name) started crying. And hoping that the girls would all flock to him like they had with Luke about a month back, but it didn't work that way. Bloke stayed quiet through the whole service and the congregation left in a rush so they could go home and change out of their Sunday best for the Fourth of July festivities.

The Dukes did their own share of hurrying, so Jesse and Daisy could get into town early and stake out their favorite spot, on the square next to the gazebo. From there they could hear Boss's shouts into the microphone that were carried into the speakers hung up on poles. Brief announcements about the classic car club coming through, and the ladies' auxiliary float, a convertible lugging a trailer that was decorated entirely with lace doilies. Reading through the descriptions as fast as he could, leaving himself plenty of room to suggest that the townsfolk partake of the overpriced, underflavored lemonade sold at concession stands around the green.

The parade had always been Daisy's favorite, with the bands and the cars painted red, white and blue for the day, the girls with batons and crisp, blue uniforms. And the veterans. Luke had marched one year, not long after he'd gotten back from his own service to the country, but he'd stayed out of the lineup ever since.

Not that Daisy cared whether her kin was marching or not, she was right there on the sidelines to clap and smile and offer unmilitary (but fairly attractive and greatly appreciated all the same) salutes to all the veterans as they passed.

It would have taken someone with binoculars pointed at the roof of the movie theater to spot Bo and Luke and Bloke. (Oh, it was still a stupid name, even if he'd resolved himself to it. Then again, Dukes never had been known for giving their children respectable names. Beauregard was probably the best of the bunch – steeped in tradition as it was – and the man it had been given to hated almost every letter of it.) The bass drum echoed off the buildings, but it was quieter up here and the baby slept peacefully through most of the pomp and spectacle. Boss and Rosco were too worried about their money-making schemes to look anywhere other than left or right, so Bloke was safe from their clutches.

_**Once the parade got done, the family headed over to Cooter's garage, the three Duke boys taking the high road, for a meal of barbecued pork and Budweiser, and then went to Watson's field for the fireworks**_. _**All three of them Duke boys stayed with Cooter's wrecker, which he left on the old playground about a mile off from the display, while everyone else grabbed blankets and strolled right into the middle of Watson's field to get a close-up view. Bo and Luke felt a mite silly watching fireworks from inside a truck, but the rolled up windows kept the loudest noises out, so the baby didn't get scared none. It's kind of cute how they look out for that little one, ain't it?**_

Bloke's vision wasn't supposed to be very good yet, but from the way he stared out the windshield in rapt fascination that kept him quiet and awed, Luke figured he had to be able to see the movement and color of the fireworks, at least.

And watching the reflection of the lights expanding then fading in little Bloke's eyes, Luke kind wondered if maybe Bo wasn't right, and they were going to do a great job of raising this baby after all.

* * *

"Now, Mr. Duke, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with your home." That was their newly consulted Capital City lawyer, Kirkham Dorrance, a friend of a friend of Luke's friend Scoop. With an extravagant name like that he probably cost twice as much as a regular lawyer named Joe, but this was a free Monday morning consultation, courtesy of someone having done someone else a favor sometime in the past. In other words, typical backwoods bargaining.

But the fancy name wasn't going to keep the man safe from the lecture Jesse was on the verge of doling out to a whippersnapper who didn't know the first thing about respecting his elders and furthermore recognizing a man who had done more than his share of good in a world that hadn't made anything at all easy on him.

Nothing had gone exactly smoothly all morning. Bloke had made getting out of the house challenging by making sure he got himself changed the maximum number of times possible, and Daisy couldn't figure out what to wear. (Clothes, Bo figured, would do the trick. Then Luke told him he had to wear nice slacks at least and he found himself digging through the closet looking for what he could wear while Daisy laughed from the hallway.) They'd taken two cars, just in case they'd needed to outfox, outrun or otherwise bamboozle the Hazzard law, but Cletus must have been sleeping, because they never saw him. Daisy got a flat, though, so Bo and Luke had doubled back to help. She was done changing it by the time they got there, and scolding them about wasting gas and time when she was just fine. By the time they made it into this simple, unadorned office space that was about as welcoming as a cardboard box, they were sticky, hot and harassed. And that had been the easy part of the morning.

Kirkham Dorrance liked to smile a lot, with his pretty, perfect teeth. He had a nose so straight it looked like it had been picked off a mannequin, a dimple in his chin with a smaller echo of it in his upper lip, and sandy hair with just enough curl to make him look like he'd recently been to Daisy's hairdresser. Crisp blue suit that fit like it'd been sewn on him, and not a wrinkle from sitting or pulling a seatbelt across his lap. None on his face either, even when that smile was widest, though he had to be ten years older than Luke and should have showed his age somewhere. The kind of man that only existed in movies or on television, leaving Bo with the strangest urge to touch his face and see if he was wearing makeup. And despite how delicious he looked, how he made Daisy swoon just by glancing in her direction, the man was nothing but misery for the Dukes.

First, he'd asked after any documentation that the baby was a Duke (there was none), then for whatever information the mother had left with the baby (there was none), then for any information at all as to who the mother might be (none of that, either). That had set him and Luke to going through the history of their conquests as they had been able to reconstruct them, which led to old Kirkham holding up a hand for them to stop. Apparently that line of discussion wasn't helping their cause any.

"You're going to have to get this child," who was sitting in his car carrier on Luke's lap. Which didn't look comfortable at all, but then none of it was comfortable. Not the hard chairs, of which there had been too few of until Dorrance's frosty assistant had been dispatched to find more, not the room with its too-bright overhead lights and antiseptic tidiness. Not the questions asked or the answers offered. "Declared abandoned."

Which made Luke tense, and Jesse go red in the face because Bloke wasn't abandoned, he was loved. Just like every orphaned or semi-orphaned Duke before him ever had been.

"It's the only way, since you can't prove paternity," Dorrance had hastened to explain, because he might have looked just as plastic as any doll Daisy had ever owned, but he was human enough. He'd bruise or bleed the same as any other man.

_**Talk about a man on thin ice. Heck, this Kirkham Dorrance is coming mighty close to falling right through and while them Duke boys would never let him drown, they probably wouldn't be too sad to see him shivering and soaked. **_

"Will it work?" Luke ground out from between clenched teeth.

"Well, it's a risk. The state might take custody at that point. They might not – the foster system is crowded and you're perfectly willing to take care of the child. But Child Services might insist on doing interviews and inspections to determine whether your home is appropriate for raising children." Those words, followed by a look that studied their thin-worn clothes and their too-long hair and that was when Jesse got to his feet.

A little backtracking from Dorrance – the nameplate on his desk listed him as a family and divorce lawyer, so he probably knew what he was talking about, even if the sound of it grated against every nerve the Dukes had – and Jesse stayed his lecture. For now.

"Things have changed in the past twenty years," were words that threatened to get Jesse riled all over again, but Bloke chose that moment to wake up enough to make some noise. Always hard to tell what it was going to be – pointless babbling or a full-out fit – but the lawyer looked uncomfortable either way. For someone practicing family law, he didn't appear to like kids a whole lot. Then again, Bo had never had any love to spare for them either, until Bloke showed up. "Since you took in your nephews and niece. There are a lot more checks and balances, a lot more steps to go through. If we could prove paternity it would be one thing. But since we can't, you may be at the mercy of a system that prefers a traditional family."

_**Oh, now, I'll bet our lawyer friend has been through more years of schooling than you or me can count. Maybe got all kinds of A-grades and scholarships, too, but that right there wasn't too smart. I reckon there's a tornado brewing in that office, and that lawyer's about to find himself sucked up into a funnel cloud of Duke tempers. He's gonna be a mite green around the gills when it's all said and done.**_

"Young man," Jesse started up and it was louder, even, than Bo figured it was going to be. "If you're saying that because we don't live in a city like you do," oh, poor Kirkham was going to get the full-blown version. Jesse was on his feet, finger out in accusation of all the wrong assumptions the man had made. "Or have fancy suits or work in a shiny white office in a concrete building with a sad little tree out in front of it trying to grow out of a hole in the sidewalk," Daisy's hand slipped up over her mouth, "then we're not fit to raise children, then you'd better just think again. Now, we may not be anything more than farmers," and former moonshiners, not to mention the probation that kept Luke and him on very tight reins, "but we're the backbone of this country." Daisy's eyebrows were up and the curve of her mouth was showing behind her hand. Bo was smirking into his own lap and Luke was sitting very seriously in his chair because he was far too mature to laugh at anything as funny as their Uncle Jesse on a tear.

"If it wasn't for us," Bloke, on the other hand, was getting chatty. Making noises and blowing spit bubbles, a tiny hand waving in the air like he was conducting the world's tiniest marching band. "You wouldn't have any food for your table, or clothes to wear. Why," Bloke was peeping up louder now, and Luke was staring hard at nothing at all with as straight a face as he could muster. "I bet you think them duds you're wearing look real snazzy, and they do." Jesse's voice went up at the end of that sentence, got echoed by a cheerful little squeal from the bundle in Luke's lap. "But there wouldn't be nothing between you and the Lord but a smile if it wasn't for some farmer," a snort escaped from Luke's mouth. Dorrance, who had been staring in utter fascination at the man who was giving him what-for, finally turned his head a little to look in the direction of the other sound in the room. "Some farmer," Jesse said again, louder, because clearly everyone was distracted and needed their attention brought back to him. "Who growed the cotton so's you could have such a nice white shirt and undershorts to match." Bloke figured that if Jesse was going to get louder, he ought to, too, so he let out a high squeal, followed by a baby raspberry.

Luke's head tipped back into a full-out guffaw that ought to have made the starched white plaster overhead snow down on them. Daisy stopped pretending to cover up her laugh and Bo giggled and offered his hand to the baby to shake. Of course it didn't work – Bloke had no idea why one of his daddies was sticking a big old hand in front of him, but he did wave his own little fingers around and let out another happy squeal.

Jesse glared at them, one after another, until his eyes came to Bloke, chirping and wiggling in his little carrier. There wasn't a man alive that could look at that and keep from smiling. Both Jesse and the lawyer gave in to little chuckles of their own.

"Mr. Duke, I'm not saying anything," Dorrance jumped in while everyone was in a reasonably receptive mood. "Except that the courts prefer a married couple as adoptive parents. If it came down to that, and if there was a married couple willing to adopt him." That sobered everyone up right quick. Jesse sat back down in his chair.

"But there ain't no one else that wants him," Bo defended. "At least not to adopt him." Because Boss wanted something from the baby, but it wasn't to raise him and love him.

"Not now. But if the state takes custody then there's the consideration of foster care and potential adoptive parents…"

"You mean people he don't know at all could end up raising him?" Daisy asked, aghast at the idea.

"Well, he'd know them after he lived with them," Dorrance tried to explain.

"But not like he knows us!" Daisy came back. "Not that's been caring for him and feeding him and loving him for months."

"I'm not saying that will happen," the lawyer explained. "Just that it's a possibility. And that trying to keep that from happening could take quite a fight. It could go on for a long time, and cost quite a bit."

"But we can't let some stranger have him," Daisy declared and she looked just about as angry at the lawyer as she ever had at any ex-boyfriend. "He's a Duke!"

Jesse took hold of her arm to keep her from killing – or just further abusing – the messenger.

"Listen, go home and think about it. I'm willing to take your case at a discounted price, because I do believe that you'll be good parents to this child. But as soon as the case hits the judicial system, all kinds of things can change. If you can keep on raising him without a legal adoption, then that might just be your best option."

Daisy was caught between still being upset and deciding that Dorrance was a knight in shining armor after all, Jesse was thankful and up on his feet to shake the man's hand for his helpfulness, Bo was standing up in anticipation of doing the same, and Bloke was making that face like he was about to make the kind of smell that would get Dorrance's offer of assistance rescinded.

It was time to go.

* * *

"Look, Luke!"

After the endless week of disasters, the Fourth of July spent hiding from the law more than celebrating, the emotionally draining meeting with a lawyer who was on their side but was about as friendly as a boot camp drill instructor, there was Bo. Standing over the baby's cradle and smiling in that way that somehow made his hair blonder, his personality louder, his body bigger than it already was. Showing off that, as long as there was one long hand on his back providing some small amount of support, Bloke could sit up on his wobbly little behind.

Which wasn't exactly like sitting up for real, but it made Bo happy. Bloke wasn't too sure how he felt about it all, head bobbing to find balance, eyes big and staring at his own pink toes, face slack with concentration. Until, that was, Bo bent over to look straight into the little one's eyes, then a smile broke out on that tiny face, matching Bo's and showing off that one tooth. There was no way to see that and not figure that maybe, in between all the messy spots where things didn't work out like they were supposed to, the world was a good place after all.

"Here," Bo said to Bloke. "Put your arms out like this." Grabbing a little fist in his, trying to hold the one and get hold of the other with just his thumb, but it was slippery and slobbery. Finally, those baby fingers wrapped themselves around Bo's wide thumb and both of his little hands were out in front like Bo wanted. "And that," his silly cousin concluded, "is what holding a steering wheel is like. There's your first lesson in driving a car; tomorrow we'll work on the clutch and accelerator."

Luke laughed and told Bo to quit stalling and get the kid dressed so they could get into the kitchen for breakfast. Got ignored.

"Now, Uncle Luke over there," left him missing the days when Bo used to accuse him of being the father. "He's going to tell you to slow down and be careful. You don't listen to him." Seemed like a really bad precedent to set, if you asked him. "You just drive as fast as you can, and you'll win every race."

It was cute, it was silly, it was funny. And then it was sad.

This was Bo. His baby cousin who had never much matured past the age of five, when cookies were the best treat in the world and brought out happy smiles, and naps were worth throwing a fit over. And there he was, passing on his dreams to the next generation. Bo should be living those dreams himself, fighting everyone he had to in order to get to the top of the dirt track circuit, to make a name for himself and move on to NASCAR. But he hadn't even driven faster than the speed limit all summer and here he was, ready to let his son – or Luke's, didn't matter which – take over before he'd accomplished half of his own goals.

Then Bloke let out a raspberry of a giggle, and Daisy showed up at the half-open door to their bedroom to see why they hadn't yet made it to the breakfast table. She got in on the excitement of Bloke's milestone and called Jesse in to see it too, and Luke shoved his heavy thoughts aside to join in with the rest of them, grinning at how their tiny baby was growing up so fast.

But he tucked the notion away for further consideration and promised himself that it didn't matter whose kid Bloke turned out to be, he'd do as much of the raising as he had to in order to ensure that Bo still got his crack at the NASCAR circuit.


	13. Week Eleven: From a Simmer to a Boil

_**Author's Note: **This chapter references the season three episode _Good Neighbors, Duke_. I assume, for purposes of this story, that the action in each episode takes place on or around the date upon which it was initially aired. (This is not something I do all the time __— sometimes I think the Balladeer got his stories mixed up and out of order. But in this case I did go with air dates as matching the time for the original events.) _

_And... that's all I'll say for now. Other than thanks for reading._

* * *

**Week Eleven: From a Simmer to a Boil  
**

_July 11-17_

Sometimes, Bo figured, it just didn't pay to tease Daisy. Unless he wanted to find himself sitting at the kitchen table, licking the palm of his female cousin's hand, because she'd seen fit to use it to cover his mouth.

_**Now, Bo, you ought to know better than that. You know the girl can take you down and beat the tar out of you, if she's of a mind to. And you wouldn't never live that down. Especially with Luke bringing it up every chance he got, so no one ever got a chance to forget it.**_

"Knock it off, Bo Duke," Daisy said. Pulled her hand back, wiped it on the shoulder of his shirt, then smacked him like an afterthought. "If you'd just listen to me instead of interrupting everything I try to say with your ridiculous nonsense," which it wasn't, he was just imitating her. She'd come into the house in a blur of bright clothes and flying hair, her pocketbook making a dense thud as she dropped it on the table like a judge's gavel. Hand planted firmly on her hip, and then she'd started talking, but she might as well have been sucking on a helium balloon for all that she sounded like an upset chipmunk. It wasn't Bo's fault that it was funny to parrot her every word in falsetto gibberish, or that doing it just made her voice climb up one more notch. "You might learn something worth knowing," she finished.

"Leave her alone, Bo," Jesse grumbled from his seat at the end of the table. A late lunch because Daisy had to work a split shift at the roadhouse most Thursdays. She'd close the place after the lunch crowd left and get home somewhere around half past two. They'd sit down to a nice meal, cooked by Jesse, as soon as she got in. At night she'd grab a bite at the Boar's Nest and the rest of them would scarf down whatever leftovers there were from Sunday's dinner. They'd been sitting here waiting for her to get home, a stew of questionable contents (Jesse never told them what he'd thrown in, called it Eat-It-And-Name-It Surprise) being kept warm over a low flame on the stove.

In between jibes at Daisy, Bo was trying to coax Bloke to eat a few bites of mashed peach because Jesse said solid foods were probably part of what had been helping him sleep through the night lately. And this time of the summer, Hazzard was just about drowning in peaches. Trees everywhere hanging heavy with fruit and neighbors passing on what they couldn't eat. One midsummer day a couple of years back, he and Luke had parked the General in town to run errands and come back to find a bunch of crammed-full and toppling bags of peaches left on their seats by an anonymous donor who was probably dang sick of eating the things for three meals a day.

"Yeah, Bo, leave her alone," Luke agreed, even if he'd been sitting next to him, not even bothering to hide a smile at the whole thing. Bloke, reclining in his car seat on the table between his two daddies, offered up a raspberry as his commentary on the silly adults. Or on the peaches that he was spitting out as quickly as Bo was trying to put them into his mouth.

"Now, Daisy," Jesse placated. "What was it you was trying to tell us?"

The girl harrumphed, a big old ugly pout on her face. But she had no choice, she couldn't throw a fit when Jesse had asked her, perfectly pleasantly, to tell her tale.

"It's just," she started, one of her hands coming out to oh-so-accidentally swat Bo on the back of the head.

"Hey," he complained. Got utterly ignored by his uncle, whose rapt attention was on Daisy and whatever it was that she was going to say.

And now that she'd gotten away with hitting him, the girl was in a fine mood, ready to chatter away. She picked up her pocketbook and hung it properly on its peg on the back of the door, clacked her heels across the floor and sat down in her own chair across from her cousins. Smiled to see everyone waiting for her words with baited breath. All except for Bloke, who was still using his tongue to shove bits of peach out of his mouth.

"I was just saying that Boss and Rosco was in the Boar's Nest this morning."

"They're in there every morning," Bo pointed out. Used the spoon he'd been trying to feed Bloke with to scrape the mashed peach off those pudgy, pink cheeks.

"Not every morning," Daisy contested, with smug spunk. "Besides, they was whispering amongst themselves," they did that all the time, too. "And looking at me." And that, too. He and Luke beat up most guys who looked at Daisy too long and hard, but Boss and Rosco had the authority to arrest them. Besides, those two weren't looking at Daisy with lust, more like scorn. "Then Boss started scolding Rosco for saying something that sounded like 'them Dukes' too loud, and they went into his office and closed the door behind them." That was also fairly standard behavior, though it never was good when they were known to be talking about the Dukes. "Then," Daisy added, "when I knocked on the door to ask what he wanted for his lunch, Boss told me to go on back to work, he didn't need lunch today."

Well. This was serious after all. Even when he was on a diet enforced by Miss Lulu, Boss still ate his pre-lunch and his post-lunch before and after she brought him the few leaves of lettuce that she thought were all he was eating. (Maybe Boss would eat the peaches, if Bloke wouldn't.)

"That does sound a mite off," their uncle admitted. "But it don't mean he's planning nothing against us." Because Jesse was a fool for hope. Or was just predisposed to assuming the best about everyone, even men who had proved themselves rotten to the core a few hundred times before. "Bo, leave that poor baby alone," got added when he tried, one last time, to push the tip of the loaded spoon into the little guy's mouth.

"All the same," Luke said, because he didn't believe a word of Jesse's optimism. "I reckon if it's Bloke," oh, it was funny how Luke said that name. Like it tasted of the soap his mouth had been washed out with a few times back in those days before he learned to keep all his mean words on the inside. "They're after, it ain't worth taking chances." Luke always had been in a hurry to protect those smaller than him and weaker, the ones that couldn't look out for themselves.

"You figure I should call that lawyer and set up another meeting with him?" Jesse asked, because somewhere in the last few years the oldster had started deferring to his older nephew when it came time to make decisions.

"Reckon so," Luke agreed.

"All right, I will. After," their uncle said, pointing toward the stove and the pot sitting on top of it. "We eat. Bo, get up there and serve the meal."

_Yes, sir. _

_**See how quickly Bo leaves off picking on Daisy and trying to feed the baby peaches he don't even want? That's because Bo Duke has never once disobeyed an order that had to do with filling his own belly.**_

* * *

"Esther!" That was Daisy, who had gotten up to answer the knock at the door.

Lunch had been eaten, taste of stew fresh on their tongues, but the dishes were still everywhere. Bo had been talking about whether they ought to try feeding Bloke again – and getting laughed at by Daisy and Luke who were pointing out that he hadn't even really fed the kid the first time – before going off to check on the corn crop. The knocking had interrupted Bo's defense of himself, and they'd all tensed. He and Bo had looked at each other, once again trying to decide whether to run when they didn't have half the supplies at hand that they'd need to care for the baby. Daisy was caught somewhere between being smug that she was right about what Boss and Rosco were up to, and being worried about whatever was going to happen next. Jesse sighed at his foolish children and tipped his head towards the door. Daisy had been the one to hop up because despite whatever was going on in their uncle's mind that had him throwing the door wide for the enemy, the two Duke boys were edgy and ready to run. Luke scooped the baby out of his carrier and into his arms just in case they had to make a quick escape.

And then there was Daisy, squealing a name that was familiar. Esther… _Esther_.

"Esther Benson!" Daisy said, just to clarify it for them all. Which still left his mind scrambling until it came up with Venable. Right, they'd known her by Venable before they'd learned that she and her father were in some sort of federal witness protection program, and that her real last name was Benson. "Why, I ain't seen you in a coon's age!" A flurry of hugs and cheek kisses later, Daisy was pulling the poor girl into the kitchen whether she wanted to be there or not. "Look, everyone, it's Esther!" added in, just in case they'd missed her earlier exaltations.

"Well, hello there," Jesse said and Bo might have gotten out the H in _hi_. Silly smile on his face turning to complete confusion when Esther made a beeline for Luke.

"Timmy!" Her voice was breathless, high and animated in that way that girls got when they were excited.

She marched herself right up to him and pulled the baby out of his arms before he could even tighten them. Sneaky girl, Luke had been prepared to protect Bloke against sheriffs and deputies, smoking commissioners in white suits, and here came this beanpole of a girl in her too-short sundress, just snatching him right up against her own chest.

_**Uh-oh. This, right here, smacks of trouble.**_

Sudden movement, being swooped up and away from where he'd been relatively comfortable against Luke's belly, and the kid let out a little scream. Started to cry for real, and Esther just shushed him.

"I missed you so much, Timmy," she said, sounding halfway tearful herself. "You missed me too, huh?"

"Timmy?" Jesse said, because he was the only one, besides Esther, who didn't seem to be totally frozen in shock. Oh, his raised eyebrows and the high pitch of his voice went to prove that he was surprised, just not nearly as much as the rest of them. "Does that mean that the little feller is yourn?"

"Yes, oh, yes, and thank you for looking out for him. I told Papa you would and he said of course you would, but it wasn't fair to make you, but we were on the run and I couldn't be sure he'd be safe with us—"

There was more, a lot more. The girl was like a pot that'd gone from a simmer to a boil to spilling over the sides in no time at all and there was nothing to do but watch the mess spread. Luke quit listening carefully when it was all too much to take in anyway, and looked over at Bo. Cocked his eyebrow.

Got a confused look back, a slightly shaken head. No, Bo hadn't been with her. Then Bo's eyebrow mirrored his, throwing the question back at him with a little bit of an angry squint behind it because Bo had liked her back then. A year-and-a-half ago, maybe more, she'd been hanging underthings on a clothesline when he and Bo (and the General) had sped across what had been the old Gaylord farm until the moment they nearly ran her over. Her hair was in pigtails then, not like now when it had been cut differently, framing her face and making her look more grown up. She'd been long and lean and helpless and Bo had taken a shine to her on first sight. Eventually they'd found out she had the same last name as Diane from the carnival and Luke had figured that at least this Benson wasn't manipulative. He'd shrugged and backed off, tacitly letting his cousin have her.

Luke shook his head back. No, he hadn't gone behind Bo's back and slept with her either. Which made everything that had happened in the last couple of months very confusing.

"You mean," Bo said in the first break in Esther's nonsense narrative, because he always was a smart one, "the baby don't belong to neither me or Luke?" His voice cracked at the end.

She shook her head, and nuzzled her face closer to her baby's head where the fluff of hair had just started to come in, a couple of shades darker than Bo's and maybe three shades lighter than Luke's. The crying was subsiding now, for both of them.

_**Nope, I don't like where this is headed at all.**_

"Here," Luke said, standing, stepping back. "Have a seat." He was a fool not to have offered his chair to her sooner. But maybe he could be forgiven, given that she'd breezed in the door and taken away the baby and his fatherhood all in a five second span.

Daisy went back to her own seat opposite Bo, watching mother and son reunite with rapt attention.

"Well," Luke said, after he'd helped Esther settle into his seat. "I reckon we can go check the fields now." What with there being no reason to do anything else important in here, not anymore.

"Now, Luke, all that can wait," Jesse scolded. And sure, it could, but why should it? They weren't needed here by Esther or by Bloke-whose-real-name-was-Timmy or by anyone at all. Sure, it would be rude to leave, but it wasn't like it had been exactly nice of her to leave a child on their porch without even—

"What happened?" he finally blurted. Because that, maybe, was the thing he needed to know, whether he wanted to or not. Why she'd left the baby here at all, and without a note. Letting them assume the child was theirs, letting them take care of him and grow to love him and—"Last we saw you, you was planning on living here forever. There wasn't no one coming after you no more…"

"Luke," Jesse interrupted, quietly, almost soothingly. But the tone wasn't for him, it was for Esther, for the babe in her arms, still sticky from Bo's failed attempt to feed him peaches. The stern focus of those faded blue eyes, that was the part that was for Luke. "Esther just got here. There's plenty of time for explanations later. Are you hungry, dear? We can find you some—"

"Oh, I'll whip up some chicken sandwiches," Daisy said, jumping back up from her chair. "I'm sure we've got some potato salad somewhere," and her head was already in the refrigerator, shoving things from here to there.

"No, thank you," Esther got out. "You're all very kind and I know you want some answers, but I was wondering if, just for now," a little sigh there, like she was tired or upset, or maybe just overwhelmed. Whatever it was, one look at her went to prove that she wasn't the same eerily sunny young lady that they'd known a year and a half back. No longer smiling in the face of what had to have been a frightening run from all manner of rotten men who believed her father had stolen two million dollars worth of diamonds and were willing to kill them both to get them. "Me and Timmy could maybe have a little time alone together?"

"Oh," Daisy said, slamming the refrigerator door as if she'd never once wanted anything from in there. "Sure, you can come into my room. And Bo and Luke will bring the cradle in there, too, and anything else you might want. Won't you, boys?"

Of course they would, and they did. They were good, polite boys after all, even if Bo was getting that tell-tale pink tinge to his face and there was a bitter taste at the back of Luke's mouth.

They did everything that was asked of them, leaving Daisy and Esther to settle in however they saw fit and returning to the kitchen and an old man that was already sighing at them.

"I know you boys ain't too happy right now." That didn't begin to cover it.

"Uncle Jesse," Bo tried, but didn't get far.

"Now Bo, hold your horses. I know, you got all kinds of questions and maybe things you want to say to that little girl in there. But she's been through something. We don't know what it is yet, but we'll find out." Sure they would and Bo was just about ready to go marching back into Daisy's room and start interrogating her. Luke couldn't say he'd be terribly sorry if he did. "Why don't you go out for a ride or something? Come back in a couple of hours and we'll all sit down together then."

Which was just a nice way of kicking them out, like giving them a quarter to go to the movies. But it wasn't so much a suggestion as an order. So they went.

* * *

What kind of mother left her baby on someone's porch? Even if she liked and trusted the porch owners, what kind of crazy did she have to be to do it?

It was the question that kept circling in his brain, mixed in with others. Worse ones, questions about what they'd do now that she was back, now that they knew Bloke was Timmy and furthermore wasn't a Duke. But those thoughts were too hard, like swallowing sewing needles. Poking at his throat and behind his eyes until everything throbbed with a raw ache, so he pushed them down. Stuck to the one he could stand to think about for the two hours that he and Luke walked the rows of corn, even if they'd been sent out to drive. They hadn't even talked about it, they'd just walked shoulder-to-shoulder past the General Lee and the Jeep and Esther's boxy blue sedan, still ticking and cooling from the drive here, and out through the tree line. Out to the fields where the crop was suffering from the long drought followed by flooding rain, would probably have to be pulled in early and ground into meal. Not a fun walk, but a car was no place to be when there wasn't a clear thought in his head, just a squirming misery in his gut.

_**Now, them Dukes has been through a lot over the years and generations. Jesse buried his parents, his brothers and his wife all within a decade and a half. He knows loss and tears and dark moods. Luke's been serious since the day he was born, and Daisy's got a stormy side to her, especially when it comes to men letting her down. But seeing Bo like this, feet dragging, eyes low, deep breaths sighing out of his body – well, you know a thing's got to be bad to make the sunniest Duke this miserable.**_

They got home from their mindless walking to find Daisy had called out of work for the evening shift and was firmly ensconced in the kitchen, cooking up all manner of good-smelling foods. Jesse was sitting on the couch and Esther and the baby were in the red easy chair. Tiny pink fingers tangling in dark hair and Bo was of half a mind to tell her to look out, that Bloke would as easily pull out a handful as anything else. But then he wasn't sure that he was supposed to tell a mother how to handle her own baby. Figured he'd gotten yelled at by Daisy enough times for telling her anything at all that he wasn't going to take a chance with Esther.

"Well, hi boys," Jesse said with forced cheer. "Esther and me, we was just having a nice visit. Wouldn't you like to join us?" Which wasn't so much a request as an order. _Come, sit, help me entertain the company._

Bo took the rocking chair, and Luke settled his back against the wall, arms folded over his chest. Got glared at by Jesse for being halfway rude by not sitting down, but Luke was good at ignoring that kind of thing.

"Hi," Esther said, and it was so quiet. Not the same girl who had grinned playfully back at him when he first met her, and declared that she had good feelings about Hazzard. (Bo could be forgiven for thinking she was talking about him as part of those good feelings. She gave him good feelings, too.) "I was just telling Uncle Jesse," who would snap at Cooter or Enos or Brody or any of the other boys they'd played with as kids that he was not their uncle, but then he'd encourage a sweet little thing like Esther to call him that. "How grateful I am that you all took such good care of Timmy for me. He says you boys did most of the work."

This was the part where they were supposed to grin and offer up a _gee, shucks, 'tweren't nothing_. Except he didn't seem to have any of that in him. He looked over at Luke to see him nodding in acknowledgement of the words, figured maybe this once that little would have to suffice for them both.

"I didn't mean to make you all think that Timmy was…" one of yours, a Duke.

"Why didn't you leave a note?" Bo cut her off, his voice tight around the edges. Not the way he liked to talk to pretty girls, but it was a simple effort she could have put in that would have made everything… not easier, not better, really. Maybe he wouldn't want to give up those days of sitting in that same red chair she'd commandeered, with a baby in his arms, staring into his face like it was the sun and the moon and everything in between. But it would have been nice to know from the beginning that he hadn't gone off and done something to make his uncle ashamed of him.

"I didn't want to take a chance," she said, voice pleading with him for understanding. "The men that were after us—"

"Who was after you, Esther?" Luke asked, standing up out of his lean and taking a step forward. His arms were still tight across his chest, though. "Last we knew, everyone who might have wanted to hurt you already thought you were dead." After all, Luke had come up with a scheme that gave all appearances that Bensons had lost their brakes on Serpentine Road, and gone off the edge of Widow's Peak. It had been one of his better plans, and Luke never did like it when something so carefully calculated didn't work out exactly like it should.

"We never knew," Esther said, shaking her head. Slobbery little fingers pulled at her hair as she did it, and she took a moment to disentangle them. Luke took another step forward, like maybe he meant to help her, but stopped. It was just habit to jump into the middle of anything involving the baby, even if they had no reason to do it anymore. "The federal agents, sometimes Dixon and Clayton, sometimes Jeffers and Thompkins, would show up where we were staying and tell us to move on. When we left here, it was Dixon and Clayton. I didn't want to go," she added. "I really did like you all, and Hazzard, too."

"So why did you?" Bo asked, got a look from Jesse that told him he needed to watch his manners, that he was pushing too hard. Still, he figured he had a right to ask. Would have even before she left a baby on their porch – they'd been friends, she'd insisted she wanted to live in Hazzard, and then one day in February, maybe a month after she and her father had been "killed" by Luke's plan, he'd driven up to the old Gaylord farm to see her and found the place just as abandoned as it had been before they'd ever come. No white linens on the line, no car in the yard and nothing but dust and cobwebs and fading memories in the house.

She shrugged, and Bloke (who he really was going to have to start thinking of as Timmy) gurgled and reached for her hair again. "I didn't want Papa to be alone. He had to go; it was him they were after. He said I could stay but…"

"I reckon we know a few things about looking after kin," Luke admitted. Felt like they'd said all those same words before, seemed like they'd been easier to say and believe back then when the only thing at stake was their faith in a pair of strangers that were new to town.

Fingers tangled in hair again, bubbles coming from the baby's mouth, and the kid looked content. Luke moved, not towards Esther and her baby this time, but over to Bo's chair. Standing behind him, gripping the carved wood at the top in clenched hands.

"Well, this time we got moved to Montgomery."

"Alabama?" From a small hidden place like Hazzard to a city like that – seemed strange.

She shrugged again, looking down at where the baby was pulling at her hair. "Timmy," she mumbled. "Stop that. He is a stubborn one, isn't he?" she asked with a small smile.

This was the part where they were supposed to smirk and say, _he's a Duke_. Except they couldn't, because he wasn't.

"He likes to chew on Luke's old hatband, if you want," Bo offered. "Or to play with car keys."

She waved him off, and went back to her story. "They said it could be easier to disappear into a big city than into a small town. They got us new clothes, made me cut my hair different so we wouldn't look like farmers," she said, frowning as an afterthought. "Not that there's anything wrong with looking like farmers," she explained. Jesse waved a hand through the air; no offense taken. "But we couldn't if we were going to blend into the city. I was so mad about it all – I wanted to be with Papa, but I didn't want to dress like a city girl or pretend I was something different than what I was. And I sure didn't want to leave here."

"Not too many people do want to leave Hazzard," Jesse encouraged with a little wink at her. "Once they've been here any time at all."

Yeah, well. Tell that one to Enos, who had run off to Los Angeles, and not only that, stayed there for almost two years now. Of course, Esther wouldn't know about Enos at all, having come around after he was already gone.

"Well, I didn't much care for Montgomery, but I figured, if we were going to blend in, there was no reason I couldn't get a job." She turned her head toward the kitchen to say the next part. "I remembered how much fun Daisy seemed to have working at the Boar's Nest, so I went to the roadhouses and looked for a waitressing job. Didn't get one there, but I did get one at the diner down the street from where we were living." All that was said a little louder, to help Daisy hear, but Bo could have told Esther not to bother. Daisy had never been so quiet at the stove in all her life. The girl had been eavesdropping all along. "And that's where I met Timothy."

"And Timothy is," Luke said, pointing at the baby, moving his finger around a little to try to get Esther to finish his sentence for them all.

"Timmy's daddy," she agreed. "I was lonely, and then I met him. He did dishes at Betty Jean's Place – the diner I worked at. He looked a little like you," she said, jutting her chin in Bo's direction, then flushing up a little in the cheeks. "He was tall, anyway. And he was in school when he wasn't working. College, working on his degree in math. He wants to be a teacher."

"That's nice," Jesse offered. "We always need more teachers in this world." Which only went to prove it had been a very long time since the oldster had sat in a classroom.

"He was nice – I reckoned I loved him and I figured I'd stay in Montgomery, no matter what." That sounded familiar. "And then Dixon and Clayton showed up again. And I couldn't let Papa run off alone. I didn't realize I was with child until we got to Jacksonville."

"Florida?" Bo's voice cracked with the question. Funny thing, how Luke's hand dropped off the back to the chair to rest on his shoulder at that.

"Yes, and Papa and I agreed that I couldn't go back to Montgomery to tell Timothy, or even call him on the phone. We couldn't take a chance with the peanut, here." Peanut. Of all the things they'd called the kid over the course of him being here, they'd never thought of that one. Wouldn't have, either. Not in a million years. Luke squeezed his shoulder, and he wasn't sure why. "So I had to be twice as careful. I had him after we moved to Valdosta, made sure I got him a birth certificate with all the right names on it as well as the fake one the feds gave me."

"Valdosta? Didn't you two never stay nowhere?"

Esther shrugged again, and Bo saw movement out of the corner of his eye. Daisy, leaning against the archway between the kitchen and living room – whatever she was cooking in there must not bear watching every minute.

"We was in Montgomery the longest." Long enough to fall in love, anyway. Then again, Bo knew that could happen fast, like getting caught in a whirlpool and spinning down until you were too dizzy to think or make any kind of sense at all. "When they came for us in Valdosta – it was Jeffers and Dixon that time, and I worried about whether it was because I'd insisted on a proper birth certificate for Timmy – they said we had to go north. So we headed up to Asheville, North Carolina in the middle of the night. And on the way there, I had Papa stop by here." Just long enough for her to leave the baby on the porch, apparently. "I told him you'd take care of Timmy, that he'd be safer with you than with us. Papa said it was an awful burden to put on someone, and I figured he was talking about you. I didn't know that he meant me – that I was going to miss Timmy every minute of every day that we were apart. Anyway, he agreed that you were good people and would do right by Timmy. So we left him. Without his birth certificate or a note, because I didn't want you to come looking for me."

Yeah, well. They'd done that, in their own way, only they hadn't known it was her they were looking for. And they couldn't have gone after her all the way up to Asheville, anyway, what with probation. But if they'd known who and where Timmy's mother was, they would have done everything in their power to reunite her with him. (And maybe, he had to admit to himself, not for altogether selfless reasons.) They would have been careful about it, but there was no telling what kind of danger might have followed them to her doorstep.

"You did the right thing," Bo admitted. Luke squeezed his shoulder again.

"I guess," she said, looking down into the face of her child. It was the most natural sight in the world – mother and baby fascinated by one another – and all Bo could think was that he wanted to look away from it. "Anyway, Papa passed away a couple of weeks ago." With that, Daisy moved to her side, mumbling apologies and hugging her one-armed. The baby figured this was an excellent opportunity to tangle his fingers into her hair, too. "And there were all the arrangements and everything I had to do to see that he got buried next to my Mama. And Agent Dixon said he didn't see that there was any reason that I needed to hide anymore. So here I am."

"Sorry about your Papa," Luke said, and Bo nodded his agreement with the sentiment. All that running, giving up friends, giving up her own kid and then losing her father – no wonder she wasn't the same cheerful girl he'd met a year and a half back. "But I guess you're free to go anywhere you want to, now."

"Have you thought about where you want to live?" Jesse asked her and Bo had the urge to go up to the old Gaylord farm and see what kind of condition the house was in. Maybe they could move her in there, and he and Luke could help her out. They could be unofficial uncles to Timmy, and teach him all the best parts of being a Hazzard boy. The fishing holes, the caves to explore, where to hide out when playing hooky, racing on dirt roads—

"I—I've been thinking about taking Timmy down to Montgomery meet his daddy. And to find out whether Timothy still loves me."

"Of course you should do that, sugar," Daisy encouraged, but she always was a sucker for love. "Why, what man wouldn't love you? And—Timmy." Just maybe, Bo thought, Daisy had realized what she was saying. Stumbling over the name, not calling the baby Bloke, maybe she'd figured it out. That this meant they'd probably never see the little one again.

"He was in school," Esther reminded them. "I don't know if he wants him—me—us, right now."

"A man wants to know his son," Luke assured her, and his voice was deep. Serious in that way he only ever got when he was compelled to talk about Lavinia or his parents. Kind of hollow and achy around the edges.

"Well," Jesse jumped in. "Until you decide what you're going to do next, you and your little peanut will just have to stay here with us."

"Oh, I couldn't," she said, but she didn't mean it. She just wanted to be reassured. So Daisy did that for all of them, and before they knew it, their girl cousin was up by two roommates and he and Luke were down by one.


	14. Week Twelve: Diminishing Dust Trails

_**Author's Note: **Yep, I'm late again. My usual nemesis (work) is to blame. But I have emerged victorious. _

_This chapter still references_ Good Neighbors, Duke_ from canon, as well as the character of Esther Venable/Benson. (There were a lot of Bensons, on Dukes - along with Esther and her father, there was Diane and Luke's Marine subordinate-turned-enemy. Which just goes to show that coming up with names for characters can be difficult, I suppose.) Anyway, she's with us for a bit longer..._

* * *

**Week Twelve: Diminishing Dust Trails  
**

_July 18-24, 1982_

Luke had never claimed to be an expert on women. Not really; he knew them well enough, had spent time with more than his fair share and maybe he had some idea of how to get their interest, how to make them swoon a little bit and get them to follow after him. He knew how to scare them off, too. But actually understanding them? No way.

Bo was a little better at that, got himself slapped by disappointed young ladies a lot less often. Then again, he had a handy smile that he could whip out whenever things started looking bad, and the girls would forget all about being mad at him and go right back to their sweet-talking ways.

When it came to Esther, Luke figured he could forgive a few things, and make up his own answers about others. Why she had done what she'd done with her baby, why she had chosen the Duke family and kept the whole thing wrapped up in a secret – he could understand, even if he didn't like it. But the way she was still hiding out here in Hazzard, keeping Timmy a secret from his own father days after she could have gone to Montgomery to reunite them – that, he couldn't begin to make sense of.

But Daisy scowled at him every time he even tried to broach the subject, so he just stayed out of it. Stayed out of everything, including the house, as much as he could manage. Told himself it was because he'd missed the fresh air and freedom to do whatever he wanted without worrying about diapers and bottles and little sneezes or cries. Told himself that not wanting to be involved in any of those things right now had nothing to do with the fact that he wasn't really invited to do them anymore, told himself it was because he was perfectly happy to resume his old life.

Bo at his elbow, the two of them not talking about anything at all because there was only one thing to talk about and that subject was off-limits, so they stuck their faces into the General's engine compartment and only came out when Daisy insisted that they show up for meals.

(And Luke hadn't once found himself standing outside of Daisy's bedroom door, listening to the familiar sound of middle-of-the-night cries, hadn't once ever wanted to just walk in there and scoop up the familiar weight, and hold it safe and warm against his chest.)

_**Now, I reckon that girl's been through a lot, and no one would blame her for wanting to spend a few days in relative peace amongst the comfort of the Dukes. But I reckon them boys have been through a lot, too. I just ain't sure whether I want Esther and Timmy to stay in Hazzard where the boys can at least know the child they started to raise, or whether I want them to make a clean break so Bo and Luke won't always be looking at him and wondering what it might have been like if they'd been able to raise him as one of their own.**_

Outside was good, just him and Bo and the sun burning into the bare skin of their shoulders, the chickens running around making nuisances of themselves, the occasional breeze to work its way through the sweat in his hair and—

Sirens. Just about as normal as birdcall on any Monday morning in this otherwise sleepy corner of Hazzard.

"What'd we do this time?" Bo asked, straightening up at the same time Luke did, craning his neck around the open hood of the General to see dust kicking up along the northern edge of the property.

"Skipped church," Luke offered, because they had. Because Esther and her worries had pretty much usurped all of their energy and no one had been willing to dress up and go into town.

"That would be lightning bolts," Bo countered. "Not cops."

Luke took a step back from the General, made a hand gesture for Bo to do the same. Closed the hood because it never was possible to tell, from the sound of the sirens or the smell of exhaust or the brightness of the red and blue lights, exactly how much trouble they were in and whether they'd have to make a quick break for it.

"The Lord works in mysterious ways," he informed Bo. "You never know how He's going to punish us for our disobedience. And if there was ever anyone sent to torment the living," he added, taking a few steps over to the post to which they sometimes tied a goat or two, retrieving his shirt from the top and tossing Bo's over to him, "it's them two."

Or three – no, four, really, because when the whining of the unwilling engines bumped over enough ruts to get close, Luke could see that there were two heads in each cruiser. He realized, as the red dust kicked up close enough to choke him, that it was a good thing he was buttoning his shirt and tucking the tails in. One of those bobbing heads belonged to a woman, maybe Lulu's age, with a prim, graying bun on the top of her head. Not the sort to be impressed by a couple of bare chested country boys.

_**Well now, I don't know. I reckon I've seen Miss Lulu smile real pretty for them boys, and sometimes wink, too. And since they ain't exactly fine conversationalists, could be that their bare chests is the only thing this here lady winds up liking about them.**_

"Howdy, Rosco," Bo called out when the cars were stopped and the sirens finally shut off. Rosco's cruiser next to that serviceable Ford that Esther had parked under the tree, black boots dropping out the driver's side of the car, unfortunate tongue scolding the chickens that were a menace to sheriffs everywhere. "Boss." Who was on the passenger side, doing his own share of complaining about nothing more serious than a little leftover mud in the farmyard that was going to get his feet messy if he stepped in it. The man had no idea – stepping into Maudine's paddock would make him messy. The farmyard mud was clean by comparison. "What can we do for you?"

Luke walked around to the passenger side of Cletus' car, which had ended up next to Dixie, to help the lady out. He didn't know who she was or why her face was so pinched and harassed (but riding with a Hazzard deputy who couldn't carry a tune in a bucket and still sang better than he drove could do that to a person), but he was a good boy, raised to help out where he could. "Howdy, ma'am," he greeted, offering his arm. To her credit, she took it, even if she did spend a little too long looking at it like it might just be a snake in disguise.

"Well, J.D.," Jesse called from the porch. Clearly he and Daisy had come out to see what all the fuss was. Cletus tripped over nothing at all, looking at the flowers on Daisy's dress – or at where they ended, a good six inches above her knee. Esther stayed back in the kitchen, baby held close to her chest and standing just inside the screen door, watching this sham unfold with a worried eye. Maybe she'd forgotten about Hazzard's excuse for law, or maybe sirens meant something else to her these days. "It's nice of you to make this social call. What's this, the third in as many weeks? Ain't none of us ailing or nothing, but it's nice how you worry so much about us."

"This ain't no social visit, Jesse," went to prove that Rosco never had learned a single thing about sarcasm, which was a pretty amazing feat considering how much time he spent in the company of Dukes. "We're here for that baby."

Esther's mouth popped open. Luke, still helping the stranger across the uneven ground towards the porch steps, offered the poor girl a wink. The gesture didn't seem to comfort her much, and the way she tensed made Timmy start to cry. Luke's fingers itched to let go of the lady he was assisting and take hold of the baby, instead. To hold him and sing to him in that way that helped him to settle down.

"What baby?" Bo asked, leaning on the General's driver's side door. Oh so casually, his shirt still open, the tails out, just a guy standing in his own yard. And just a half a second of practiced moves away from making a break for it in the fastest car in the south. "Oh, you mean Esther's baby. You remember Esther Benson, don't you, Rosco, Boss?" he offered with one of those real bright grins. The ones he saved for when he was being as helpful as he could to the befuddled law of the land.

"Of course," Luke added, letting go of the unfamiliar lady's elbow, depositing her at the foot of the porch stairs. "You knew her as Esther Venable back then. You know, the girl that moved onto the Gaylord property with her father about a year and a half back?" He scratched at his head. "Before you could manage to foreclose on it, as I recall. What was it you wanted that property for, Boss? Condominiums?"

"No," Bo contradicted. "I think it was uranium he was trying to mine—"

"Uranium? Now that don't make no sense, Bo. Even Boss knows there ain't no uranium in Hazzard."

Rosco's head was swiveling back and forth like he was watching a tennis match.

"Luke, I'm telling you—"

"Now, Bo, I'm sure it was condominiums."

"Dat!" Boss cut in. Funny, he seemed a bit put out to have two of his failed businesses touted in front of the strange lady he'd brought with him on this errand. "We're here for that baby, and we ain't leaving until we get him."

"Oh, well, then I guess you're going to be with us for a spell," Jesse said. "Why don't you come on inside, and Daisy can get you some lemonade."

"Sure!" Daisy agreed. "I can even put some extra sugar in yours, Boss, because I know you like it that way." She turned to go inside, ignoring the protests that followed.

"I like my lemonade with extra sugar, too, Daisy," Cletus called. The girl stopped long enough to blow the deputy a kiss, then opened the screen door and stepped inside where she put an arm around Esther's shoulders.

"Sure, you can all set with us a spell and have a nice cold drink. And you can introduce us to this fine lady you brought along with you," Jesse finished, over Boss's _dats_ and Rosco's _ijjes_.

"Well, all right, I'll just do that." It was the first thing anyone had said that Boss agreed with. "This here is Miss—"

"Ms.," the lady in question corrected.

"All right, this is Ms. Evelyn Gill. She's a social worker from the Georgia State Children's something-or-other—"

_**Boss never has been too good about remembering the name of any agency he don't control. Still, I don't reckon this lady is going to be awfully impressed by that little quirk. Or anything else, for that matter. She looks just like every schoolmarm that ever did take a ruler to a naughty boy's knuckles.**_

"Division of Family and Children's Services," Ms. Gill clarified, primly. Still standing at the foot of the stairs in exactly the position Luke had left her. Casting her eyes here and there at the chickens, as if they might attack her. A true city lady and Boss must have imported her from Atlanta. "We received a report from the local sheriff that the Duke family was in possession of a child that didn't belong to them."

Well, she got that part right, anyway. Luke looked over at Bo, who was still leaning against the General's door, but no longer smiling for anyone's benefit at all. He flattened his lips against each other and looked out over the farmyard at nothing in particular.

"Well, of course the baby's not ours," Jesse explained, extra politely with a little bit of sugar on top. "He's Esther's. And that's Esther right there, holding onto him." And he was still crying, too. "You want to meet her? Come on out, Esther, dear."

No one could resist a request from Jesse, especially when it was more of an order. Daisy shoved the screen door open for a timid Esther, then followed her out onto the porch.

"Hi," was the tentative offer from the young mother.

Ms. Gill stepped up onto the porch to get a better look. "Well, isn't he a nice, healthy-looking infant," she said, casting her eye toward Boss. Who was starting to fidget like a misbehaving child.

"I swear," the commissioner said and he really could have been an eight-year-old, caught with his hand in the cookie jar. "That girl hasn't been here all summer. Them sneaky Dukes must have brought her here from somewhere. It's a trick!"

"A trick!" Rosco echoed, taking a step closer to his boss. Could have been supporting him or hiding behind him. It was a hard call.

"She ain't the mother, she's just—"

"Commissioner Hogg, you just hush now," Ms. Gill snapped, a proper schoolmarm with a squirming brat in the front row.

"Hush. Sh-sh," Rosco said because he never could keep himself from echoing the loudest words spoken in any conversation.

"You're scaring this child."

Luke wanted to correct her, to tell her that really, Boss probably didn't much matter to Timmy right now, it was the way his mother was holding him, too tight and with slightly shaky hands. But that little bit of insight wouldn't help anything right now.

"Miss Benson," the social worker said. "You wouldn't happen to have this infant's birth certificate, would you? And some identification for yourself?"

"Um, yes, it's in my car. I'll get it," Esther offered. Ms. Gill put out her hands to hold the baby while Esther went in search of the birth certificate, but the girl ignored her. Came down the steps and handed Timmy off to Luke before heading over to dig through her own back seat and the boxes she had in there. Her whole life in the back of her car, and Luke ought to feel bad for her. But all he could think about was the solid weight of a baby in his hands, the smell of powder and formula when he dipped his head close to the baby's, the vibrations of cries quieting as he held that tiny body against his chest. Cletus stepped up closer to the two of them and stuck out his tongue. Maybe, Luke figured, Cletus had finally found someone his own mental age to play with.

Timmy had gone completely quiet and relaxed in his arms by the time Esther produced what was asked of her and carried it to Ms. Gill, up on the porch.

"Well," the state official said. "This proves it. Mr. Hogg, this has been a complete waste of my time." She began to march herself right back down the porch steps. Boss, seeing her coming, cringed. But she wasn't going to hit him, she was just making a beeline for the cars so she could get as far from the farm – and, most likely, the chickens – as possible.

"Help her out, would you Cletus?" Luke asked, because he wasn't ready, not by a long shot, to give up what he was doing right now. And the lady in question was looking at the dirt at the bottom of the porch steps like it was an alligator-filled moat. (It was a good thing she didn't get to see some of the wilder parts of Hazzard. Then she'd really have a reason to be nervous.)

With a great deal of clamor and clatter, the four intruders got themselves into their various vehicles, complaining all the way. Luke just stood where he was, watching them as they tried to negotiate their way into the cars, then backing out the way they'd come. Bo's arm came across his shoulders, familiar as the summer air, and one of his long hands came up to cup the back of the baby's head. Stroking that light fuzz of hair that was neither as blond as Bo's of as dark as Luke's, but somewhere in between. The two of them stood there like that, holding the child and staring out at diminishing dust trails, as long as Esther and the rest of their family let them. (Which wasn't nearly long enough.)

* * *

Luke wasn't ever much of a crier. He hadn't cried at Lavinia's funeral or probably that of his own parents. Hadn't cried over pets that died or girlfriends that left him, hadn't cried when the draft notice showed up in the mail. Didn't cry when he was cutting onions, though he could rarely be compelled to perform such a chore, anyway.

He didn't cry when Esther finally got up the gumption to take her child to meet its father, either. He just stood in the dust she'd kicked up, squinting against the rising sun's invasive rays, arms folded across his chest.

Bo hadn't cried either. Not much, not in any way that he figured anyone would notice. His eyes itched and his throat was raw, but only one tear got loose and that could have been the morning breeze coupled with tired eyes.

He hadn't cried afterward either, when he and Luke took Jesse into the fields to see the state of the corn. He'd just had a little headache, was all, so he wandered off on his own for a few minutes, looking down and away from the too-bright sun.

He hadn't cried at dinner, but his throat hadn't been all that interested in swallowing, so he'd eaten lightly. No one said anything to him about it, and that might have been the worst part of all.

He wasn't crying in bed, either. Not really, not like the keening wails and miserable shrieks that had come from the little boy who had been his and Luke's roommate for about two-and-a-half months. Heck, he didn't even sniffle, not a whole lot, anyway, and it wasn't his fault that sometimes lying down made him congested.

He wasn't crying, and that's why it made no sense when Luke started singing. Quietly, in that same way he'd done it for those first weeks when he was caring for the baby on his own. About running down the road, trying to loosen his load with seven women on his mind. About not letting the sound of his own wheels drive him crazy, and taking it easy.

It didn't work the same way as it had on the baby; after all, Bo wasn't crying. He was just allergic to the bed or the pillow or the empty spot in the room where there had once been a cradle. But the sound was soothing, it was familiar and it reminded him of bumps, bruises, cuts, hurt feelings, angry schoolyard fights, whippings and broken hearts, all of which had always started to feel better when Luke sang.

He didn't need it now, he wasn't a kid anymore. Even so, he didn't roll over and tell his cousin to shut up, he just kept his thoughts to himself until he found himself yawning, and by then he was starting to drift off, anyway.

_**Shh, let's just leave them be. I reckon them boys could use some sleep.**_

* * *

Nothing lasted forever. That was an early lesson in his life, and Luke had heeded it, mostly. Knew that things changed all the time, sometimes for the worse, and there was nothing he could do about it.

The corn knew it, too. Much of their crop was mushy brown at the base of the stalk, though the husks were immature but otherwise okay_. Reckon we'll have to bring 'er in early_, Jesse had said when his nephews showed him the problem. They were giving it a few more days to ripen, but they'd have to get it before the husks rotted entirely and the crop fell on its own. Too much of a good thing – sun – for most of the summer, drying it out. Then too much of a good thing – rain – over the course of a few days and the crop was going to be early, small and ground into meal because it was otherwise dead.

Life was fragile and tenuous and sometimes fickle, it came and went as it saw fit. But that wasn't what had happened to him and Bo. This had been some other form or torture doled out by the universe, a cosmic lesson in the lives they'd led up until this spring and the things they'd given up to live those lives. Taking too casually to their untamed bachelorhood and it would make sense for them to be punished for such thoughtlessness, but why did Daisy and Jesse have to get drawn into the mess they'd made? (Because they got pulled into every mess the boys ever made, and why would this time be any different? Jesse, in a quiet moment that first night after Esther showed up, apologizing for having been so hard on them about taking care of the baby in those first weeks, and why should he? The kid could as easily have belonged to one of them as not.)

Bo was sitting on the paddock fence, chewing a weed and otherwise doing nothing at all. Luke tried to remember the last time Bo had been that still and figured it might have been when he had strep throat half a dozen years back. Then again, Luke had taken to voluntarily chopping wood, something Bo avoided as often as he could, so maybe his cousin was playing possum. Staring at the horizon, which hadn't much changed in all the years they'd lived here, and no. No matter what excuse he tried to put on it, that was definitely not normal behavior for Bo.

Daisy had gone off to work, even if she was early for her shift. Some sort of excuse about wanting to sort the sugar packets and fill the ketchup bottles, but mostly, he figured, she wanted to get away from the stifling and unwanted blanket of quiet that had settled over the farm.

Jesse was out in the farmyard, sitting on his stump next to the hitching post and discussing milking and other goatly topics with Bonnie Mae, including her unfortunate habit of gnawing anything and everything left at mouth level. Milking and coaxing and patting and watching Bo in between. Keeping his own quiet about his feelings, other than his complaints about the misbehavior of livestock. But every now and then he'd meet Luke's eye.

_Fix this_. No one said it out loud, but then, no one ever really did. Fake bank robberies and illegally foreclosed farms, damsels in distress, crooked gambling casinos, stolen diamonds and lawmen in the pond – most of the time it was just a look that came from Bo, Daisy, Jesse or even Boss Hogg, silently asking Luke to start scheming their way out of the mess. Of course, in those situations, all Luke had to do was outsmart some bad guy, get Bo to drive at speeds illegal even on a racetrack, then climb out of a window and jump from one car to another, duck bullets and break out of jail at least once – not necessarily in that order.

This, right here, this was a far more serious situation, one that acrobatics and fast talking wouldn't cure. A truly dangerous mission because what hung in the balance was emotion and broken hearts, the kind of thing that Luke didn't fully understand, much less know how to fix.

_**Yep, that boy is way out of his depth, there.**_

He went back to his chopping, because it was simple and required nothing more than brute strength. But even as he lifted the ax up and brought it down, his mind insisted on turning the problem over and over, looking at the inner workings and trying to figure out how to repair them.


	15. Week Thirteen: Acting the Part

**Week Thirteen: Acting the Part  
**

_July 25-31, 1982_

_**Even Hazzard ain't nice all the time. This here is one of them days when the ground is baked to crumbling under the relentless summer sun, and even the flies are lying low in search of a cool spot to spend the day. Puffy, white clouds to the west may or may not add up to anything at all like relief, but them dust clouds right there in front of us, those are beautiful to behold. Especially when the General Lee's emerging out of them with two boys sitting right up there in the front seat grinning at the scenery flying by. That's just about the prettiest sight Hazzard has seen all summer long.**_

"Well, hello, Cletus," he muttered, like it was a surprise. Like he hadn't driven the General right up Blacksmith Road, planted his foot on the accelerator and tapped the horn as he passed the drooping, thick thatch of Spanish moss that covered the live oak on the hill.

Luke, sat up from his casual slouch and looked over his shoulder to get a look at the gleaming white of a cruiser behind them, as if he had the pressing need to corroborate the screaming of the siren. (As if he hadn't directed Bo to drive up this way to begin with.) "Where'd he come from?" Deadpan, in that way that only Luke could pull off.

"Does it matter?" Bo asked him, with a grin that felt every bit like he was on a stage somewhere. Wearing gobs of makeup and a scripted smile. "In a minute he's going to be eating my dust." Reciting lines he used to know by heart, and now he had to work to remember what they were and how to say them.

"Only if you make some dust," Luke offered, and he was acting in that same play with Bo. The one they used to call everyday life and now it was… strange. Stilted. Rehearsed.

Luke pointed out the windshield all the same, telling him to get moving with just that little. They only had so much time, really, to play. Jesse's big toe or trick finger or just his old bones had twinged this morning, telling him that the corn had held out as long as it could. Tomorrow they'd harvest; today they were to stay out of the old man's hair. It was as normal as anything that had happened this summer could be. Jesse liked to rest quietly the day before harvest, but more than that, he liked to give his nephews a chance to play before the hard work started in. Especially this time, so close to those weeks when the two of them had been shamed into playing daddy to a kid that hadn't belonged to either of them. (But could have, maybe should have. It would make plenty of sense if he had been. Luke's or his; they'd both played loose and fast, a thouhgtless roulette with women. Their number should have come due.)

"Watch me," he said back to Luke and for all their acting, this next part was real. His foot, the gas pedal, the road unwinding before them like one of those curly ribbons Daisy liked to put on Christmas presents. The steady heartbeat of wind pounding in through the windows and the dust he'd promised making its determined way into their breath. Luke slouching in the seat next to him, a faint smirk on his face because this pointless chase was bound to end in some sort of disaster. Jail never had been fun, but it would make Jesse set the harvest back for one more day, so it wouldn't be all bad.

If it ended that way, but Bo saw no reason why it should. Cletus was already backing off behind them, taking some extra time to navigate the trees and boulders that crowded in on the road here and there, watching out for ruts left behind by the heavy rain of a couple of weeks back. Bo was on the edge of disappointment that it had been so easy when Luke pointed out the windshield in front of them.

"There's Rosco." Yeah, he could see him up there, blocking the road with his pretty white cruiser. Relatively dent-free, since he hadn't been chasing the Duke boys around for a few months. (But thoughts like that only led to dark places.) "Look out!" Luke hollered when Bo didn't slow or change course.

When they were kids, Luke was the one who got blamed for having a temper. Which was weird, when he thought about it, because Bo had one, too. Always knew it, could feel it come on like a fire in his face, a bell in his ears and hands clenched so tightly into fists that they hurt. But Luke was the one that got yelled at, that took whippings and got told that he was the oldest and he should have known better. Bo got ice for his bumps and bruises, and shaken head and lectures about not following Luke into fights. Coddled instead of whipped, and he'd never fully understood it.

And now, in a flash as bright as the sun overhead, suddenly he did. Bearing down on Rosco's car with all the anger in the world pent up in his chest, as though crashing into it would take away the pain of loving, then losing, Bloke. A deliberate act of violence rather than an impulsive one – and that was what Luke got punished for.

But ramming the cruiser wouldn't do anything except make one hell of a noise, smash Rosco's car, hurt the General, and maybe him and Luke, too. At the very least it'd be an expensive mess to fix, so he swerved, cut a new angle between two trees and took off overland.

He hadn't hit Rosco, and yet there was the crunch of bending metal behind him all the same. Bo checked the rearview mirror, but the ground below them was rough and bouncy, leaving him trying to sort out something in the neighborhood of six images all at once.

"You just watch the front," Luke said, rising and twisting around in his seat. "And don't hit no trees. I'll watch them." A deep laugh followed, confirming what Bo had guessed. Their pursuers had run into each other in the effort to follow them. "They're still coming," Luke informed him.

Yeah, the sirens were holding steady now, the sound no longer fading into the moss and dead leaves that carpeted this part of the forest and hid the roots. They were just west of the old Barnett farm, where Boyd Barnett kept about 80 head of cattle. And unless he and Luke wanted to spend the afternoon (and probably half the night, too) wrangling the cattle and getting them back home, he figured he didn't want to go driving through the fence around that property. The alternatives were driving north through the forest for about three miles to come out on Route 31 (but he might just rip out the General's undercarriage that way), or south to the creek bed, but he couldn't swear it wouldn't be flowing too heavily for the General to cross. So he found a relatively level and open area between the trees, skidded into a one-eighty, and charged right back at Rosco and Cletus.

"Bo," Luke complained, turning back around and plopping properly into his seat, then throwing an arm up like he needed to protect his face. Silly man. They weren't in any real danger – not yet anyway. Neither Rosco nor Cletus could drive worth a bucket of spit, but they were predictable, and so far as guts went, they had none. When he came at them they swerved in opposite directions, running over rocks and clipping trees along the way.

By the time the General was back on Blacksmith Road, going back the way he'd come, the two cruisers behind them were filthy and misshapen. Rosco was going to drop his bumper on the first big bump he hit, and Cletus had lost a headlight.

But for now they were following gamely like a pair of kids who didn't want to be left behind, so Bo took pity on them. He could remember how little he liked being told not to follow if he couldn't keep up, so he slowed his pace. Not much, not enough to let himself be caught, just enough to make the boys in blue feel good about themselves.

Luke, to his credit, didn't complain. Just slouched low in his seat, elbow braced on the open window, and watched the scenery fly past him with a smirk that was neither happy nor amused. It was the same as those almost-forgotten lines they kept saying. Part of the routine, part of the show.

The road wound out in front of them; those same turns, just in the opposite direction now. Kicking up the same dust but the sun was more toward Luke's side of the car instead of his; looked different, tasted the same when it got into his mouth. He closed his lips against it, decided not to say anything. His foot did the talking for him, his hands on the steering wheel that might as well have been custom built for him. The General growled as they made the descent out of the wooded hills and toward the lowland clearing.

A fork in the road and Luke didn't talk either, just pointed off toward the left one. Bo was already going that way, didn't need the instruction, but Luke always gave it anyway. Telling him where to turn and how to navigate the road of a county he knew like the back of his own hand.

The pond road, with its rises and dips that sent the stomach flying and if he took them just right he'd hop over the top. Rosco could never resist trying to imitate him and half the time he'd find himself in the water from just that little. Didn't this time, though his bumper ended up in the high grass and weeds on the side of the road. Cletus was behind him, like the caboose on the world's shortest train.

It was funny that the law never could remember how this story went and where it ended, though they'd lived it a hundred times before. The way the pond narrowed until it trickled over a waterfall dam built of stones that all of their ancestors must have laid by hand, then became a stream. How the road took a ninety-degree turn right at that spot, but there was a clearing and a rise if you went straight; how the Duke boys hopped effortlessly over the widest, deepest part of the stream. How the law had to either follow or slam on the brakes and they never could make up their minds which they meant to do.

Rosco decided to stay on the same side of the creek as his bumper and Cletus probably had no thoughts at all in his hamster wheel of a brain. The end result was a collision that sent Rosco flying into the creek and Cletus tipping and slowly tumbling after. Rolling once and making a fine, wheels down, amphibious landing. Complete with foamy, arcing splash that reached as far as the General's back end where Bo had stopped him on the opposite bank.

Luke's deliberate temper – it wasn't a pretty thing. His humor could be a little rough around the edges, too. Less than sympathetic, as he sat there laughing at the calamity in the creek. Not that Bo had any right to say anything about Luke's behavior when he was laughing just as hard. But he knew, now, that laughter could taste as bitter as vinegar when it wasn't entirely sincere. When it didn't come from true happiness, but from amusement at another's misfortune. It was better to be laughing than crying over things that hurt, maybe, but dark amusement didn't take the pain away. It was still there, hidden away in the dark corners of what was supposed to be mirth.

"Should we help them?" Bo asked when he got tired of pretending to be happy. Now he knew what it was like to be Luke, to look straight at a sun-drenched day and mostly see shadows.

Luke tilted his head, silently asking if he was crazy. "Only if you want to get arrested."

Bo turned to look out through the droplets on their back window again. Rosco was waist deep in water, holding Flash up as high as he could while berating Cletus, who was climbing dizzily out of his cruiser window. Didn't seem right to just leave them there. He looked back at Luke.

Luke, who raised his hands in surrender. "Call in Cooter, then. But do it quick – we don't want to give them a chance to climb up here and snap them handcuffs on us."

_**I don't reckon them boys need to worry too hard about that. As long as you got Cletus and Rosco stumbling over each other in the water like a couple of pups just learning their legs, ain't no one going to jail.**_

Bo grabbed the C.B. and called for a wrecker, then drove away slowly, enacting that same play they had been all along, reciting all those lines he always did with Luke, about how the Hazzard sheriff's department must have gotten their licenses out of a box of cereal.

* * *

Fix it, fix it – it was a rhythm to work to, anyway. The combine was older than any of them; the tractor wasn't a whole lot younger. All the equipment needed a gentle hand or it'd quit running out of spite, so Jesse drove the tractor that towed the binder, which Daisy sat on the back of and kept in line. Straight rows of planting cut and bundled into straight rows of sheaves then shocks and he and Bo got to be the ones with cuts on their hands and bits of stalk and leaf in their hair. Not that he would have it any other way.

Fix it, fix it, because Daisy was plenty proud sitting up in her hard seat and Jesse had the comfort of routine running through him, as soothing as fine sipping 'shine. But Bo was just there, working across from him, not complaining of bleeding palms or a sore back or the heat and his own sweat. He simply gathered stalks and tied them together, moving steadily and without any concern for how his hair was going to bleach itself to that bright blond that he hated so much, while his skin turned berry-brown.

Luke wondered, idly, if his own shoulders were set as low as Bo's, if he was moving with that same mindless shuffle. Tired, sure, they were both that and maybe that explained a little bit of the slump, the deafening quiet from a guy that usually had no idea when to stop talking. But not all of it, because this tired wasn't half of what they'd been in those early weeks of having a crying baby in their bedroom. When they'd been just about walking into walls while making inane conversation about which of them was suffering more.

The chugging of the tractor quit up ahead at the end of the row. Daisy was waving at them from where she'd climbed off the binder.

"Lunch," Luke mumbled. The sun burning into his bare back was one of the clues, Daisy's big smile was the other. If the tractor had broken down she would have been standing there with her hands on her hips mentally calling it all manner of rotten names. She was the last one to have fixed it, and she sure wasn't in a hurry to do it again.

"All right," Bo agreed, tying a knot in a piece of twine and dropping his latest sheaf in line with the rest of them.

Walking, not running, to the shade of the maple where Daisy had left the picnic basket this morning, sandwiches and fruit and carrots, a thermos of lemonade that didn't stand much of a chance of being cold anymore. The checked blanket she spread over the dirt as they all convened on the spot to sit, Daisy just as gracefully as a lamb, legs curled underneath her, Bo with his awkward, long-legged thud, and Jesse with knee-popping care. Luke found his own corner to settle onto and waited for a chicken sandwich to be dug out of the basket and handed to him. Unwrapped a corner of the wax paper and waited.

Jesse looked around at the three of them, raised his eyebrows to find that none of them (specifically Bo) had gone off and taken a clandestine bite, and said grace. They settled to crunching and chewing, passing the thermos around as it was requested, and it was quiet. Too quiet; this was the part where Bo was supposed to tell Daisy how good the sandwich was and ask her how many were left in the basket. Whether he could have two or would have to settle for one and a half, but there his cousin sat, seemingly content with what he had in front of him. Which would have been fine if it had been a pretty girl, but not with food. There was never enough food for Bo Duke.

Fix it, fix it – it was a reasonable rhythm to chew to, too. Ignoring Daisy's eyes on him, ignoring the whining mosquito that was circling his head in search of its own meal, looking at the methodical way that Bo chewed and swallowed. Figured that yeah, he probably did look the same, doing everything by rote and muscle memory.

Bar fights were stupid, ending in split lips and jail cells more often than not, but they were good. While they lasted, anyway. Distracted a man away from any thought other than trying not to get clobbered while landing that perfect punch, everything was bob and weave and duck and now, now, now—

But bar fights ended, winners and losers alike limped away (sometimes in handcuffs) and reality came right back, with side order of a headache.

Fix it, fix it. Like the refrain of a never ending song, the kind with a three-note melody that was both easy to sing and incredibly annoying.

Yesterday's game of tag with Rosco and Cletus hadn't been terrible. It had been okay, mostly, except for how Bo's smile was dull and flat, his driving lackluster and the way he'd forgotten to let out a yee-haw as they jumped the creek. Still, there'd been moments when it was almost normal.

Luke took another bite of his chicken.

"How's the tractor running?" he said, because he was sick of his circular thoughts and the silence that did nothing to interrupt them.

"Good," Jesse answered and then it went right back to being quiet. Aside from the cardinal somewhere up in the branches overhead, peeping and probably waiting for them to move on so it could come down here and investigate their crumbs.

Fix it, fix it.

Girls. Girls had been the cure to just about everything that ailed Bo since he'd loudly discovered them somewhere around the age of thirteen. Distractions to every sense he had (even the common kind) and they could take him to that forgetful place with just a wink and a smile (and a silent promise of more than that). Then again, girls were dangerous.

"We're making good progress," Jesse observed. "I reckon only another two days and we'll be ready to leave her to dry." The corn that was, because it was only going to be ground into meal, anyway, which they'd sell to the Barnetts for their livestock.

"That's good," Luke agreed, "ain't it Bo?" A verbal prod because his cousin should have been chattering about something, anything, throughout the meal.

"Yep," his cousin agreed, then went back to his sandwich. Heck, he should be on his second or third helping by now, too.

Girls were good, but only so much good. After all, the fact that Timmy hadn't turned out to be Bo's son didn't mean he couldn't have been. Might have been Beauregard, Jr., if Esther and her father had stayed in Hazzard longer than they did. So girls—no. Girls were out.

Fix it.

"You want another sandwich, sugar?" Daisy was asking. She said it twice before he realized she'd been talking to him. Somewhere along the line she'd started handing more out, and he hadn't noticed. But Bo had his second one in hand already, so Luke figured it was safe to take another one himself.

"Eat up," Jesse added. "We need to get back to work." Which was the first warning and it didn't mean much of anything. There were probably at least two more coming.

Girls were out, and what else did he have? Daisy had drowned whatever sorrows she had in a silky pink dress with matching spiky shoes. Came home and waved the department-store bags in their faces, ran into her room to play dress-up so her family could get the whole effect and she'd smiled at the wolf whistles she'd gotten. That was fine, Daisy had an income and a love for pretty things, but it wasn't like a new pair of jeans would cheer Bo up, even if he could afford them.

There was Cooter's garage, maybe. New spark plugs for the General, perhaps a couple of belts? Something cheap, something they could pay for later, but get now, and then they could spend time digging into the engine compartment, replacing and cleaning and—

"Come on, sugar, finish up. We got to get back to work." Daisy nagging at him, which meant he must have missed Jesse's second warning. He shoved the last of his sandwich into his mouth and signaled for the thermos. Got it handed to him by Jesse, who was giving him a mean look for the way he'd stuffed too much in his mouth at once.

But he didn't care about that, didn't care about the way Daisy was shooing him off her picnic blanket so she could fold it up, didn't care that they were about to go back out into the blistering sun.

He figured he probably had that look in his eye again, the one Bo sometimes complained about. The one that meant he had an idea, and if his mouth wasn't so full of bread and his hands busy holding onto the thermos, he would have snapped his fingers and said those three fateful words: _I've got it._

* * *

"Hey, Bo."

_**The Dukes' north forty might just as well be a fresh scar, bumpy and jagged, still an awful mess and hard to know whether it'll ever look right again. Two days later and there's Bo and Luke, two moving parts in an otherwise still field, gathering up what was standing only a short time ago, and is now as stubbly as a newly recruited Marine's hair. Tying up the last of the sheaves of corn, getting ready to bundle them into larger shocks, then leave them behind to let the sun finish the job of cleaning up after this mess of a summer. Jesse and Daisy have finished their part, at least mostly, and taken the heavy equipment away to leave the boys to the quiet that has fallen over them like a baby's silenced cries. **_

Stubs of stalks, creaking under foot as he moved from one shorn row to another to collect the fallen ears into a bundle. The world smelled green, even if it was tinted towards the pink of impending sunset. Quiet for now, but once the tractor and binder were cleaned and safely stowed in the barn, Jesse and Daisy would find their way back out here, even though all the work left to be done was heavy and neither of them should be trying to do it. Soon the arguments would start followed by threats that Jesse wasn't so old he couldn't tan their hides for their disrespect, but for now it was just him and Luke and the crows that didn't look too happy about the current state of what had been a full field of corn until they started this harvest a couple of days back.

"Yeah, Luke?" he grunted back. Down close to the ground, tying what he'd collected into a sheaf and thinking that there had to be a more efficient way to do this. (And there was, but it would involve fancy equipment and lot more money than they Dukes would ever have. Especially after the loss they were going to take this summer.)

"I reckon tomorrow we should go over to the garage and register for the Choctaw 500."

"What?" _What?_ That was nuts, they hadn't been on the dirt track circuit all season and they didn't exactly have a whole lot of money to spare for the entry fee, not to mention getting the General well and truly tuned for that kind of race. "Luke, we ain't been driving almost the whole summer, and that race ain't but two weeks away."

Luke snorted at him from across a couple of felled rows. The showoff had already collected a bunch of sheaves into a shock, used his knife to cut a length of twine from the giant spool, and was binding the whole mess together into an upright bundle. "You saying you can't outdrive them Gardner brothers on short notice?"

No, he could make mincemeat out of Harvey and George Gardner with no notice at all, even if they had just gotten that new Mustang last fall. "I can beat them." But what was the point? The season would end in a few months and there was no way they could be contenders for the shiny, silver cup that got awarded at the tri-county fall fair. "There just ain't no point in signing up for that race."

Besides, they were going to have to stop talking and pick up the pace or Jesse would be trying to help them when he got back out here. Bending and lifting and his back wasn't as young as it used to be. He looked up at Luke to tell him so, found that his cousin was staring at him. Frozen like a fawn in an open field when they had a ton of work to do, his hands planted on his hips in a perfect imitation of Daisy in one of her tizzies.

"What?" he asked, because maybe he was mistaken. Maybe he'd misheard or misspoken. Maybe Luke was having heat stroke or something, but he couldn't imagine why he was getting looked at quite like that.

"Since when do you need a reason to enter a race?"

He shrugged, bent back to his task. His fingers were raw, felt thick and clumsy. Halfway useless, but it wasn't like he hadn't been through this before. He just needed to concentrate. "Since we ain't got no money to spare?" he offered. "And since I just don't feel like it, Luke."

That got his cousin squatting down next to him. He half expected Luke's hands to be feeling him for fever, but they went to holding the sheaf for Bo so he could dedicate both of his to tying it off.

"You're tired," his cousin declared. "It's been a long week." And it was going to go on even longer if they didn't get up off the ground and start doing some real work, so Luke stood up, offered a hand down to him.

Bo took it because he always had, because Luke had helped him up after everything from football tackles to fistfights to rollovers in the General followed by crawling out of upside down windows. Because his cousin was strong and steady and always there when Bo needed him.

"Leave the rest of the sheaves for Daisy to do," Luke advised, his free hand loosely gesturing back toward the house and when Bo looked he could see the bright yellow of her shirt. She was already on her way. "They're light. We'll do the shocks," which meant bundling a lot of the sheaves together and it was grueling work. Bo wasn't in a hurry to get to it, but then again he didn't want Daisy trying it, either.

Luke dropped Bo's hand when he was on his feet and they headed off in two different directions. Daisy and Jesse made it back and there was a lot of shouting back and forth, suggestions made because neither the girl nor the oldster took orders well. Before long, Luke had them doing exactly what he wanted, though – Jesse heading back to the farmhouse to cook up something filling and Daisy working on the sheaves that they hadn't finished.

Then his cousin came over to him, helping him gather up the sheaves they'd already made and tying them up into shocks that would dry right there in the fields. "I'll call Cooter," Luke said to him and maybe he should have known better than to think the subject of racing had been dropped. Luke never forgot a single thing in his life, never gave up until he got what he wanted, even if he had to take some bruises and bloody noses along the way. "And find out what the entry deadline is." Used to be they knew these things by heart. "You just think about it. Tomorrow, when you're less tired."

"Yeah, all right," he said, because it was easier than arguing with his mule of a cousin. "I'll think about it." Which was as good as saying, _yes, let's do it_.

That smile on Luke's face knew it, too.


	16. Weeks Uncounted: Two Ugly Decisions

_**Author's note: **In my defense, I wouldn't have done it if canon didn't do it. (You'll see that part when it comes by.)_

* * *

**Weeks Uncounted: Two Ugly Decisions and One Beautiful Opportunity  
**

_August 1 – September 11, 1982_

_**Ain't it funny how a clock goes 'round in them same circles, day after day. You can't see it speed up or slow down, but you know it's gotta, because an hour on a picnic blanket with your honey don't last half as long as an hour in the dentist's chair. Well, all along them Dukes has had a long, slow summer, but now that the hours ain't being counted in diaper changes, things has sped up a bit. Mostly, anyway. Them boys is still out of sorts, so I reckon there'll been some long nights in there.**_

The thing was, he had to pull Jesse in on his plan early. Which felt like a conspiracy and would have been fine if it were Rosco or Boss they were plotting against, but it wasn't. It was Bo.

Then again, it wasn't so much _against_ Bo that they were plotting, as _for_ him. At least that's what Luke told himself.

The Sweetwater 500 was grueling. Maybe he'd forgotten what it was like to go through that many laps, maybe he'd forgotten how tight the turns on that track were and how the General's passenger seat wasn't as soft as it used to be. But Bo won like he said he could and that was all Luke needed him to do.

Or almost all. There was the Cedar City Showdown the next Saturday. Bo still wasn't as enthusiastic about it as Luke might have liked, but he agreed to enter the first time he got asked, so that was progress. And he won that one, too, even if Jason Kirby tried to run him off the track on the 79th lap and ended up flipping his own car over to collide with the barrier. Bo just steered calmly around him and cruised to the finish line a half-lap ahead of anyone else.

And funny thing if the prize money they earned didn't get turned down by Jesse. "Use it for your next race," the oldster said, so they did. (That and paid off Cooter for the new fuel line he'd put in before the Sweetwater 500.)

The North Georgia Outlaw Run was where the plan started to come together. By then he could trust his cousin's heart to be in the race, and besides, it was in a convenient location. Just off the interstate, close to both the Tennessee and North Carolina state lines. At that point he'd talked to Cale a couple of times, made arrangements and done quite a bit of cajoling. But that part came easy – he had practice convincing people to do things they otherwise never would.

By the fourth race, the Choctaw Classic, he had to fight Bo for the chance to drive. Just that one, because Cale said it was a good idea to prove that he could drive well enough to win, too. When the Chickasaw Cross-Country came along, August was flying past and word of a pair of hot drivers from the middle of nowhere was getting around. The first team to make an offer was Melling and the second was Ranier-Lundy, and it was getting close to time to let Bo in on the whole thing.

Those were the weekends. The week days passed a lot more slowly. They gathered and ground the corn into meal, sold it and put the money away for winter. They hunted and fished, which Bo did willingly enough, even if he complained it was still too hot and that the cool of October or at least September would be a better time for both activities. (Yeah, well. Usually they had the luxury of waiting until fall, but if Luke got his way, they wouldn't this year.)

Boss had the only air conditioned house in Hazzard – heck, it was the only air conditioned building in the whole county – and as usual, he stayed there twenty-four hours a day through the sweltering month of August. Rosco ran his errands for him and otherwise only dealt with genuine law emergencies, which meant that the usual dog-day calm had settled over Hazzard.

And that left the Dukes at loose ends far too often. They'd take to the roads when they could, repair whatever Jesse asked them to, and otherwise try to stay out of the house. Still, Daisy caught him on the couch one day, when Bo had gone into town after some alfalfa for Maudine. Luke got left behind in the shade of the house, and figured on a little quiet time to read up on some of the top NASCAR contenders in the latest issue of Hot Rod magazine. Looking at Kyle Petty's numbers and thinking about the family dynasty when his female cousin showed up.

"It's nice to see you smile again, sugar," she said and he closed the magazine and started looking for a way out. A door, a window, heck, he'd hidden in the pantry once or twice when the law showed up. There had to be somewhere he could go. "I've been worried about you." Because that was what this was about. Daisy, trying to mother him now that there was no baby in the house to take those instincts out on.

"I'm fine," he said and wondered how long he could barricade himself in the bathroom before she decided to burst in on him anyway. Probably not very long. It was a shame that he and Bo had broken the lock on that door all those years ago in a pointless fight over who was spending too much time in there. (Bo was, that was who. Hours in front of the mirror, brushing his hair this way and that, trying to decide which showed off his pretty face best.) "Ain't no reason to worry about me."

"Of course not," she said in that tone that didn't believe him for one second. Hands on her hips, standing in front of him like a linebacker, ready to take him down if he tried to get past her. "You're just fine, you don't miss Bloke, and you ain't been surly at all, neither."

This was where, if it'd been his youngest cousin she'd been cornering this way, Bo would have stood up, then stooped back down to get right up close to her face. Informed her that he wasn't surly and asked her where she got off saying he was. (Or he might just have let her comfort him to begin with.) Luke knew better than that, knew that there was no getting away from her, either. So he picked up his magazine again, opened it to any page he could find, and set to reading the words in front of him. The same sentence over and over because he couldn't concentrate around the noise of Daisy insisting that it was okay that he missed the baby he and Bo had been raising, heck, they all did. And it was good that he was doing better and so was Bo, but really, they needed to quit hiding here at home. The girls at the Boar's Nest were all asking after them and—

It was a relief, in those sweltering late summer days, to finally pull the family together for a meeting one Saturday and announce that he and Bo had done well enough in their dirt-track racing to earn what now amounted to three NASCAR offers to consider. The Donlavey team had joined Melling and Ranier-Lundy in sending out scouts when Cale Yarborough told them where and when the Duke boys had been racing, and all three had made offers.

The yee-haw that Bo let out at the kitchen-table meeting would have gotten him sent to his room if it'd been for any other reason. As it was, Jesse just grimaced a little and told the boy to settle down, and that he still had to decide which team to drive for. Daisy was caught somewhere between excitement and sadness that they'd be leaving, but she pored over the offers with them, pointing out this or that in the fine print. Luke was torn between Melling and Donlavey, but Bo, with his usual faith that only good things would befall him, decided on Donlavey after only the briefest moment of thought. Sometimes his cousin was a fool, but Luke had no reason not to indulge him this time. When it came right down to it, all of this was for Bo. To give him his lifelong dream in replacement for a son that never had been his, even if he'd grown to love him with all his heart.

All that was left was accepting the offer, setting a starting date, and commencing to pack up their lives.

* * *

By the time he realized he was neck-deep in a Luke Duke plot, he was already enamored of the whole thing. It wasn't until later that night that the doubts began to creep in. Darkness heavy on him like a blanket, the whirr of cicadas drowning out every other noise in the whisper-quiet house where everyone was supposed to be sleeping, but he figured they were all playing one kind of possum or another.

"Luke, we can't go," he blurted, and it felt loud and sudden to him. Luke didn't think so. Rolled over to face him and seemed to find it utterly normal. "What about the farm? We can't leave Jesse."

"We'll be sending him money, Bo," didn't even playact at being half asleep. Luke had been waiting for his objections, had probably planned out his responses weeks ago. "He can farm if he wants to, but he ain't got to no more."

Jesse would farm until the day his hands could no longer grip a bale of hay or milk a goat's teat, but that wasn't what Luke was talking about. He meant that the farm no longer had to turn any kind of profit at all, and that should have been a relief, an accomplishment worth celebrating. If only six generations of Dukes before them hadn't been farmers. (And moonshiners, but they couldn't be that anymore, either.)

"What about Boss? And our probation? He ain't never gonna—"

"Bo, you really figure that Boss Hogg wouldn't jump at the chance to let us out of probation when it means us moving all the way up to Virginia?" Which was the offer they'd decided to take, the one more than five hundred miles away, in Richmond. At least, that would be their home base and where they trained. But the circuit would take them all over the country. "Heck, he'll probably be standing in the middle of Hazzard Square waving goodbye to us as we drive away."

True enough, and this was the problem with being caught up in a Luke Duke plan. Everything moved at a dangerous pace, stupidity piled on top of recklessness and thinking came to the party late. Of course Boss would be happy to see them go, and he'd start working on stealing the farm out from under Jesse and Daisy five minutes after they were gone.

"We can't go," Bo said with renewed urgency. "Luke, imagine what kind of trouble Boss will get up to if we ain't here to stop him. Heck, Jesse and Daisy will only be his first victims. The rest of the town—"

"The rest of the town will pitch in to stop him." Which went to prove that Luke hadn't thought quite everything through. The rest of the town hadn't ever managed to stop Boss without them before.

His cousin sighed, an admission of all the answers he didn't have down pat, maybe. Acknowledgement that it was a risk to go, but Luke still wanted to. "Sleep on it," was the advice. "We ain't signed nothing yet." And more than that, a tacit agreement that if Bo really didn't want to go, Luke wouldn't go without him.

Bo shoved at his pillow, rolled from his back to his side. Closed his eyes, settled, tried to count sheep, but all he could see was brightly painted cars on an oval track, moving too fast to keep track of.

"Why now?" he asked, when he figured out that he was still just awake as he'd been all along. The quiet hum of Luke's response proved that he didn't understand the question. "Why do we got all these NASCAR offers now?"

"Because I called Cale and asked him to help me get some scouts down here to see us drive." Well Bo knew that already. It was part of the whole discussion they'd had earlier that day. "And they came and liked what they saw."

"But why did you call Cale now?" Heck, they'd first met Cale close to three years ago, and they'd been paying their dues on the dirt track circuit for three years before that. If it was that easy to get someone down here to see them drive, why had Luke waited this long? Why hadn't he done it two years ago, before Diane Benson and her carnival ever came to town? Why not right afterward, when Bo had proved his skill not only as a driver but a stuntman? Why now when they'd just spent the summer not doing much of anything at all in a car, when they'd—"Did it have anything to do with Bloke?"

Another heavy sigh. "You ain't going to sleep, are you?"

"Not until you answer my question." Which Luke didn't much like, it was clear. The bed took the brunt of it with a creak that went all the way down to the frame – his cousin flopping over, punching at his pillow and kicking his covers. Making a big show of trying to settle down to sleep when both of them knew Luke wasn't going to manage any such thing. Besides, the effort to not answer was clearer than any words would ever be. "Why would you want to do this now?"

Because Luke knew better than any of them that problems couldn't be run from, that they followed you off to boot camp or war or a race track as easily as anywhere else. This couldn't be running away, so it had to be something else.

The fool didn't want to talk about it, but then Luke never wanted to talk about anything that he couldn't build up or tear down with his hands. A plan or a car or a bar fight – his cousin could discuss those endlessly, but this wasn't that. This was something that hurt them both in ways that a few bandages wouldn't fix.

The thing was, Luke couldn't lie and he couldn't pretend the question was never asked. All Bo had to do was wait. He pushed himself up on one elbow, so his cousin wouldn't have any fantasies that he planned to fall asleep.

_**Bo's somewhere between crazy and brave to keep hounding Luke like this. Then again, he's probably the only person in the world that can manage it without coming away with a black eye.**_

"Why now?" he asked again.

Luke slapped his hand down on the bed. _Quit asking me, Bo_, in the gesture, which meant he was close to giving in and answering.

"Why now?"

"Because," Luke said, and the tone was thick with gritted teeth and unspoken curses. "One of these days, it's going to be real. One of us is going to get married and have kids. And we won't be able to just run off, then."

"Richard Petty has kids." And so did his father, Lee, and they were both on the circuit when they did it, too. "Heck, even Kyle Petty's got one."

"Pettys ain't Dukes," Luke answered him. "When you was talking about Timmy," because that was the baby's real name and Luke would never forget that, "becoming a race driver, was you thinking you'd be out there driving, too? Or just him?"

Well, Bo hadn't thought about it that hard. He'd just figured the kid was a Duke and he'd race but—

"It don't matter," Luke decided. "The thing is, if we don't go now, we might never go. And you might never get to do the one thing you been wanting to do since you stole your first toy car out from under my bed."

Now that wasn't entirely true. What had been Luke's had always been his, from toys to dreams. They'd both laid on their bellies in the dirt, pushing matchbox cars in circles and calling it a race, and they both talked NASCAR since they'd been able to pronounce the name. But he reckoned he understood what Luke was trying to say.

"All right," Bo said. "As long as we can make things safe for Daisy and Jesse to stay behind without us, we should go," he said. And didn't remember much after that, not even falling asleep, but the next morning he woke up all the same, signed the contracts and shook Luke's hand in that same wordless pact they'd made over and over again since they were kids. _We're in this together_.

* * *

Making sure that Daisy and Jesse would be safe happened by degrees and ended in two painful decisions. The second one hurt worse.

But that was after they managed to get their probation revoked, which took a little more effort than he'd thought, since Boss decided to pretend that he couldn't unleash two known criminals on the greater world. Not without monetary assurances that they'd behave themselves, and Luke told him to go fly a kite. Waited two days and sent Jesse out to shame him, and funny thing if the oldster didn't come back with passes for him and Bo to be out of state, indefinitely.

Once that was settled, it was time to announce their plans to friends. Starting with Cooter, who punched them a little too hard on their shoulders, congratulated them, admitted he was jealous, then reached behind his pile of fan belts on a shelf in the back of the garage to dig out an old mason jar of 'shine, and set to drowning his sorrows like he was five years younger and a lot less responsible.

After that came Bo's farewell tour through all the girls in Hazzard, who were mourning his imminent departure like it was the death of all the beauty in their lives. Bo was making the grand sacrifice of spending private time with each and every one of them, reassuring them that Hazzard would always be his home, that he'd never change his hair no matter what, and that he'd send them all autographed photos of himself when he got famous.

Luke, meanwhile, was packing. Thinking about what they'd need, what they'd want and just how much space they had to carry it all.

That was where the two decisions came in. The first was made by Jesse, who called their cousins (second cousins, Luke mentally corrected – he, Bo and Daisy were at the end of this line of Dukes, as Jesse was perfectly willing to remind them at any time) Coy and Vance, found that they were at loose ends, and asked them to come stay a spell at the farm. Just for a while, just to make sure that Boss didn't do anything crazy in celebration of there being two fewer Dukes in Hazzard.

The second decision was made by him and Bo. Seemed like, if there was any trouble at all, their kin were going to need the General Lee to help them out of it. And there were plenty of other fast cars where the two of them were headed, so they didn't need him. Not really, and if it was like leaving behind a part of themselves, at least they knew the fine piece of machinery that they'd built from the ground up would be in good hands.

_**Well, now. I didn't figure I'd ever see the day when Bo and Luke would leave the General behind. I ain't none too glad to watch them do it, but old Luke there has got a point. There ain't no one in the world – other than the boys themselves – who can look out for Jesse and Daisy better than the General Lee.**_

So come one crisp morning in early September, they found themselves being driven to the Chattanooga Airport, toward a direct flight to Richmond. There were tears shed in the car, and more at the airport. _Good luck_ and _take care_ and _call me when you get there so I know you're safe_ – then Uncle Jesse got one of those specks in his eye and had to be driven home. Meanwhile, he and Bo boarded a plane, squeezing into a pair of seats that were too small and far too close together. Elbows bumping, Bo flirting a can of Coke from the stewardess, and then the ground fell away. Nothing to tell them where they were, no familiar landmarks and they might as well have been lost.

Except for that smile on Bo's face, the one that was full of excitement and anticipation, the one that figured that everything that was about to happen to them that would be good.

There was happiness in that smile, and there was a future. And that was the best thing Luke could ask for, anyway.


	17. Twelve Months Later

**_Author's Note:_ **_In honor of the sad fact of James Best's passing, I'll post this last chapter today. Sweet Rosco holds a special place in my heart._

_This is it for this one. My next is likely to be posted only on AO3, as it's probably outside the guidelines here (not because of the rating, but because of the style). I'll post a link on my profile when it's up over there. I've got others on the various burners, and I'm sure they'll make it up here sometime in the future. In the meantime, thanks for coming on another ride with me, and catch you on the flip side. _

_Khee khee. Gyu._

* * *

**Twelve Months Later**

_September 30, 1983_

_**So that's how that ball of yarn unwound – from one confounding spring morning, spinning all the way through into the hard decisions of that fall. While they were at NASCAR living their dreams, Bo and Luke healed from the kind of heartbreak that was much worse than anything any pretty young lady had ever put them through. By the time they decided to come back to Hazzard the next February, they'd quit hurting so bad. Maybe more importantly than that, they'd gotten a chance to do what they'd been talking about since they wasn't no more than little kids. They'd moved forward and they might never have had a reason to look back – except here they are, just over a year after they went off to the circuit, caring for another baby that's been dropped into their lives.**_

By the time they get Jamey back to his jittery, fast-talking and single-minded mother, the poor kid's been through the wringer. Maybe Bo can't blame the woman for her nerves. If Bloke had been caught out in the middle of a brush fire with only a blanket, Daisy's wits and a prayer to keep him alive, Bo would have been more than upset, he would have been crazy. Stupid. He would have done whatever it took to save the baby. (He would have done exactly what he did for Jamey – driving straight into the fire with Luke in a water truck at his back. Maybe he's never needed a child of his own to bring out the stupid – and the hero – in him.)

Of course, the Dukes all invite Jamey and his mother Mary Lou to stay at the farm with them for the night, until the little family of two can find a place of their own. It's not long before the women retreat behind Daisy's door, where there's no question that mother and child will ultimately be spending the night. For now it's just a nap for the kid, and excuse for Daisy to spend more time cooing over him. She's got that look to her like, now that Enos is back from his tour of duty in Los Angeles, she might just try to settle down with him and have a few babies of her own.

(Hers will be cute, no doubt. Sweet-natured and trusting, and spoiled beyond what's healthy, because his girl cousin is a soft touch when it comes to kids.)

Luke's got an entirely different look about him, one that Bo hasn't seen in a year or so. Like a mama cat after all of her kittens have been given away to excited kids, but she's still wandering the barn, calling for them. A little dazed, a little distant, his eyes focused on nothing at all. Remembering what it was like to sit up all night, singing to a baby that knew nothing at all about tone and pitch and pace, and who looked up at him like he was the singularly most gifted singer ever to walk the earth all the same. But wishing he could forget.

NASCAR was for Bo's sake, he knows that. It was his big cousin deciding that he needed a chance at his dreams. But he hadn't been the only one who needed the change, someplace else to be for a while. The speed at which NASCAR moved – and not just on the track, but in endorsements and sponsors and fancy meals and travel (and girls, everywhere the girls with bright eyes and wide smiles) – was good for both of them after that sleepy summer. New people to meet and impress just about every week, and they'd plastered on smiles that they didn't always mean, but after a while they became real. They each picked their poison – Bo had fun and Luke worked hard – and deciding to come home after six months was easy. They were ready to ramble over familiar roads, kicking up dust and trouble in equal measures, they were ready to plant the fields and clean the stables. They were even ready to sleep in their own beds without that little cradle along the one wall, without those tiny breaths and piercing cries to listen for.

And now, more than a year after they first left home, Luke's got that hollow-eyed look about him again.

"Come on," he says to interrupt all those ridiculous thoughts going through his dumb cousin's head. An elbow in his ribs because the fool is nothing if not stubborn about his relationship with his brain. About the only thing he pays more attention to than thinking is tucking in the hem of his shirt, which is a waste of time when it's only going to slip loose again within minutes.

"What?" Like waking up out of a dream or just now realizing that he's here in the living room of the house he's lived in, on and off, since he was a toddler. Standing around and doing nothing of significance. Mooning over the closed door between him and a girl he has no particular feelings for one way or the other, and a baby who he never loved and never once believed could be his own.

"Come on, we got time before dinner." And then the drive-in movie after that, if they can motivate everyone to go. But Luke doesn't have the first idea why he's supposed to care about free time. "See, the way I figure it," he starts out, crowding himself into Luke's space. Making his cousin look up to meet his eyes and it's guaranteed to irritate him. Which is good, if he's annoyed he's not sad and more than that, he's paying attention to what's being said to him. "Boss ain't going to give Rosco and Enos back their cars at least until tomorrow." Probably longer than that. The commissioner seems, as Rosco would say, serious this time. "And I reckon they'd have a heck of a time keeping up with us on them horses." Nothing like a police chase that can't go more than about fifteen miles an hour.

Luke smirks and rolls his eyes like it's such a dumb idea. But he comes along anyway.

Bo still doesn't plan on having any kids of his own. Sure, he got around to liking Bloke. And he figured out how to hold him, feed him, even change him. He might even have loved him, but that was a one-time thing, the only kid he'll feel that way about. If anything, having Jamey here today has reinforced that for him. He felt bad for the kid, sure, and wanted him to get back to his mother as quickly as possible. But he didn't touch him more than was strictly necessary, and didn't much want to, either. Babies are messy, noisy, demanding creatures, and Bo figures he can go through the rest of his life without ever having to wipe slobber off his fingers or change a diaper.

"Why do you get to drive?" Luke snarks at him when he jumps off the porch and bolts for his usual side of the car.

"Because I've got the keys?" Because Luke won't put his whole heart into driving right now, not when his head is still somewhere else entirely. He'll stick to straight lines and level roads, and that's not going to be enough. Not today. "Because I want to." Luke never argues with that logic.

They're just about choking on the dust of Old Mill Road when Bo realizes that he has no idea where the law might be hiding when they're on horses in the heat. Probably not at their usual speed traps. He wanders by each of those anyway, just on the off-chance, but there's no sign of them. He hops over the top of Clinger's Ridge just to keep things interesting.

Heads into town, just in case the law is there. Has to behave himself on the streets there – too many unsuspecting civilians out and about, but no sign of horses or cops. And Luke's not even looking for them now; he's just sitting low in his seat and staring out the window. Thinking.

Bo takes them out to the old playground near the school, which turns out to be just as empty as everywhere else. Not even kids, so Bo skims across the grass, skids around the far side of the swing sets and heads for the monkey bars. Luke's silly, he ducks like Bo would ever get him hurt. Besides, the bars are shaped like a rainbow with plenty of room underneath for the General. (Might be a bit close on the sides, though. The mirrors are in jeopardy.) Pulls out the other side without even scratching the paint and does a one-eighty to a full stop. Waits for Luke to quit acting like a baby and start yelling at him.

"What'd you do that for?" And there it is.

"Because I can't find Rosco and Enos," he says with a shrug. _And you aren't any help_, he doesn't bother to add. _Sitting there and staring off into space, not even paying attention to my fine driving skills unless I scare the heck out of you_.

"Go down by Hazzard Pond," Luke offers with a wave of his hand.

Right. Cars need gas and horses need water.

He takes one of his famous long shortcuts, overland and through the trees, just to keep Luke annoyed. To keep him with him, paying attention to something other than old miseries.

Luke, he knows, is the one that's most likely to settle down. To find himself a girl with practical expectations and a sturdy body, who will want kids as much as his cousin does. Who will understand the vagaries of good crops and bad, the risks of life as a Duke, and be willing to be mother to the next generation of the family line all the same.

"There they are," Luke confirms, smugly proud of himself. Which is fine, his cousin can be right this once if it makes him happy and a willing participant in the game that's about to start.

Enos is, inexplicably, knee deep in the pond. Then again, closer inspection proves that Rosco's standing on the shore, water dripping out of his clothes and hair, a rivulet running down his chin. His hat's floating in about two feet of water. Two plus two equals four and Bo would wager that a horse either threw or just plain nudged the sheriff into the pond, and Enos has just fished him out. Horses are smart creatures after all, and there's little doubt that Rosco's been hurling insults at his mount all day.

"Hey there, sheriff," Bo calls out the window; seems nicer than letting loose with the horn. That would only spook the poor horses, who have already had a rotten enough day, what with being forced to cart around a pair of lawmen who have no idea how to handle them. And one of them had to put up with Boss on his back, too. "Sorry to interrupt your bath."

Enos has slogged out of the pond with Rosco's hat in one hand, and is waving the other at them cheerfully. Aside from their family, Bo figures Enos might have been the happiest person in Hazzard to see him and Luke come back from the circuit. He's still thrilled to see them every time they come upon each other again.

"Bo Duke," Rosco screams, which is real convenient. Now all four of them – all of whom have known him pretty much since he was born – know what his name is. "What're you doing here?"

Bo looks to Luke in silent question. _Do you want to sass him or shall I?_

"We just came by to say howdy," Luke offers. Hollering out the window so the law can hear him over the sound to the General's engine, the breeze through the trees, and the water in their ears (or Rosco's, anyway). "And let you know that we was considering breaking a few vehicular laws." It wasn't a confession, and it wasn't a lie, either. They have been thinking about breaking laws, though they'll probably never get around to it, not when speeding would make them lose their tailing lawmen and ruin the game. "In case you was interested."

"Interested?" Rosco growls. "You just, you—" He takes a soggy step toward them, slips on his water-slick boot soles. "Wait right there," he finishes.

"You heard the man," Luke informs him. "He told us to wait right here."

"I heard him," Bo agrees. Puts his foot on the gas and pulls forward along the dirt road about ten yards. Stops there to see Rosco trying to run after them on foot. Right about when the sheriff gets close to their bumper, he pulls forward again, this time twice as far. Hears Enos' squeals telling the sheriff to come back, to get on his horse and—

Bo waits patiently, the engine idling along and doing nothing more than wasting gas as Rosco waddles back to his horse, tries to get his foot up enough to make it into the stirrup. Can't manage it, so he cajoles Enos down onto all fours, climbs on his deputy's back and tries to get on the horse from there. The animal steps sideways, just out of reach, and Rosco hollers a few unfriendly things about it (and quite possibly its mother) and tells Enos to move. The poor deputy tries to crawl with Rosco still on his back, winds up dropping to his elbows and apologizing for the way Rosco teeters off of him.

"Reckon you'd best go down there are help him get onto that horse," Luke observes casually. "If you ever want this chase to get going."

No thanks; Rosco may not have any understanding of horses whatsoever, but he does have handcuffs, and he'd most likely snap them onto Bo's wrists if he got close enough.

"They'll figure it out," he promises Luke's skeptical face.

And they do, though Bo gets to worrying that Jesse'll be calling them home for dinner before the chase can get underway. Once the law is on their horses, it's a matter of getting them facing the right direction, then they take off after the General at a slow amble. Bo nudges the accelerator, gets the whole procession moving at a whopping ten miles an hour. Luke's looking out the back window and laughing at first, but it doesn't take too long for him to get bored with that.

So Bo pushes the pedal to the floor, leaving the boys in blue well behind them. Heads for the creek up ahead, points the General's nose right at the ramp of a bank. Figures, why not. There's only so many more times he's going to be able to do this before one or the other of them gets too grown up to be able to come out and play anymore. Looks over at Luke to see his cousin brace a hand against the roof – he's ready, so Bo focuses forward, feels the hum of the engine and the lift as the creek bank falls away from underneath them. Lets out a yee-haw, and hopes this flight through the air will never end.


End file.
